Nice tautology, now offer some connincing argument. Sounding too smug doesn't support the assertion. It just sounds like you are trying to dismiss an underlying problem like a moral failing, like a poor philosophy. Just saying "That's business" does not justify anything, In fact it can seem like an evasion of responsibility. Evading responsibility is a big part of the problem. People who make decisions aren't suffering the consequences and aren't being held accountable, not even if purely accounting terms as if that were objective and obeyed conservation laws. So wealth does not obey conservation, does it.
Americans are anti-intellectual for being too pragmatic and now, too unproductive, not from the criteria of wealth or its distribution but from just not doing anything useful. The case in point is finance and administration, generally, not just in schools but in business and government generally. We need to rediscover useful work. Someone mentioned PhD Mathematicians making 6 figures working as quants. Isn't that a totally cynical waste of time and useless speculation and greed? Shouldn't people make better use of their talent and time. If Americans can find no higher calling that that or using computer science to push social media marketing schemes. then maybe they deserve what is happening to them. I wish America could have a Cultural Revolution: force all the business and finance and administrators to have to work in the fields harvesting vegetables and fruits for a living. who knows people with those backgrounds are making such poor decisions that the environmental catastrophies they are bringing down on all of use might make them have to literally scrape to survive in just that way. I think that much of the evil in the world is due to the thinking that comes out of business schools and the pragmatism of Americans generally, that wisdom is traded for easy gain and that we have sold out morally to people who will continue to screw us. Capitalism run amok, not solved by deregulating markets. When government gets out of regulating markets, organized crime takes over. We must be responsible for each other and to each other and begin to think of consequences beyond the next fiscal quarter.
Slashdot Beta is not the answer. It is regression to the failing standard of the average blog post as set by Google and Facebook and all those sites the OP is suggesting needs improvement. As long as it is the site owners who want to be in control of discussions, we may not progress very far, but if they are really interesting is sparking discussion then they must introduce features of older discussion forums and features of USENET, meaning user-settable topics, context quoting, and forking of subthreads. Context quoting with percentage reply to quote rule is easy to do and can be done now in blogs that adopt Markdown and use a perl or javascript program to enforce the ratio. Longer topic lines with some kind of context threading is only a little more difficult.
The key is user control of context and that is exactly the feature missing in the major blogs and social media sites. That make it easy for marketers to mine posts but it is damaging to discussion and is why in the area of social activism social media is so shallow, dealing only with simple impulsive issues that have no long-term sustainability. In order to sustain a discussion or an issue with any complexity something more complex than social media blogs needs to be done. Even something as straight forward as USENET discussion forums on a web interface would be a big step in this direction. I am talking about the text-based forums. The abuses of the binary groups could be solved by only allowing links.
It is important to realize why discussions don't really effectively take place on sites like Google+ and Facebook, and why even Google Groups is a poor interface to the USENET groups it ports to. The reason is the blog model that does not support the complexity needed for a real discussion.
This is the main reason why I oppose Slashdot Beta, because it weakens the complexity needed for discussion to go any where and the reason Dice is pushing it is for the marketing opportunity presented by what is more of a blog-like structure. Maybe marketers and business people aren't smart enough to deal with contextual discussions, but I'll tell you what, the future of democratic institutions may depend on there being extensive discussions. like have occurred on Slashdot, and that business people who want to "simplify" things may reveal how tyrannical and anti-democratic they truly are, The blog my have been adopted innocently because of the ease of web coding to get blocks of text from Javascript textareas, but it could have been more sinister than that in the scale of the social media sites, an intentional desire to dumb-down discourse in the world for political control. Death to blogs!
It is far worse than that and when you consider what is bad about speculation then you have to return to the whole process of assigning value to capital assets. So, if finance is just a game then where smart guys get profits, companies and the whole economy are hurt because something useful does not get done, financial assets have no intrinsic value by themselves. In addition the emphasis on short-term ROI takes away the ability of a company to be managed astutely. It is almost as though to become a public company makes your operation a scam, and the bubble in stock prices shows that. The catch is that like value in social media, stock prices represent a subjective and self-serving process where analysts invent impressions out of thin air that investors mistake for real value.
I worked for a computer company that is no more. When I joined it the stock price was about $7. It peaked at $127 and by the time it was bought out the stock was worth about $3. I was long gone by then, but I remember that the CEO threatened to buy back the company and make it private late in the game. The thing I was too stupid to realize is that many of the customers in banking and finance probably used the high performing servers for HFT, and to that end speculation driven by this type of finance probably undermined the company. I believe that it was the computer revolution itself that created the monster, greed loves speed, which is why the emphasis on short-term ROI was driven by the speed of transactions.
I was at Sun from 1997 to 2004 and there were good and bad times. I saw my first Sun 3 in 1988 thereaboouts and did some development work. C and shell, and then system admin of small LANs for a couple of start-ups and research operations and a couple of tech support roles. It was tech support I did at Sun mostly supporting Solaris and later legacy compilers. I left Sun because the emphasis had moved away from Solaris and on to Java and related tools. I felt that the APIs were poorly designed, too big, and complex. For me, as a visually impaired person the coding conventions in Java were hard to deal with and the language hard to use from a support role. I had been supporting the OS and legacy compilers and found Java to be an annoyance. I also felt that Sun was playing catch-up to other IDEs at the time and not doing too well. Later, Netbeans would look competitive to me, but not back in 2004. I think that the shift after 2003 and the emphasis on Java was what killed Sun. I think that Sun could have made more revenue from the FORTRAN compiler and legacy tools than it ever did from Java and that it mstepped and paid the price. I never liked Oracle and Larry Ellison and wonder how the HW guys are faring in that scam. Sun might have prospered if it pushed Solaris more on X86 and it failed because it let technology beat performance of its SPARC platform. I am not sure that Oracle can do better.
I couldn't agree with you more. The importance of teaching and your profession is unsung, and the denigration comes at the hands of conservatives in business who know full well that they do not want a population that can see through the marketing and propaganda bullshit that drives consumerism, social media, and business. These conservatives who attack teachers and their unions also know that public workers get more selective attention because of legitimate scrutiny that their own for-profit businesses would not allow and just claims that their employees and the management produce just as much dangerous and interior products, the case of the auto makers comes to mind, that for profit it's OK to screw people but dare not any public employee get a break.
Besides that is the rising tide of elitism in the current economic and political system and the threat a sane educational system would actually promote more inclusion and citizenship than elites, especially Conservatives want. That is as much a factor in the huge inflation of the cost of a college education and why so many students are in hock. The net effect is that America becomes less democratic and as the economic system becomes more exclusive so does the political system. America could lose all of its inclusive political institutions. A sound education prepares young people to assume citizenship in an inclusive and open society. I think than many critics of teaching do not want that. They want privileged elites, they want an exploitative economics and politics, like a Latin American Oligarchy.
I think that part of the plan was to allow for cheap alien workers to so burden the system with their social and language needs, that educators would have to spend so much time catering to minorities that the higher order needs of making well-reasoned citizens would be diluted. Why have consumers who can argue with you when you get cheap labor that is just so thankful to be here that they will do whatever you tell them to at half the price? That is why Congress has been so reluctant to do real immegration reform and secure our border with Latin America, particulary. I am not blaming the people from south of the border; they have a right to get from us what they want; we make it relatively easy for them, but I think that the fact plays into the hands of business people who want to exploit all of us and keep our school system from functioning in the way it needs to for democratic processes in this country.
Business doesn't necessarily support democratic traditions and the one thing educators can do is to teach students to think critically about well financed persuasion of all sorts, whether from advertising, public relations, propaganda, political rhetoric, manipulation and fragmentation of mass media. I think that at any one time only a small percentage of a population will ever be proficient in technical fields and mathematics. It would be more important to teach most people how to reason and how to write with some basic skill, and technology can be used to help this.
In fact, I have proof of malgeasance on the Internet on this matter of public discussion, or learning to debate and reason. The very medium of social media, the blog, poses a huge impediment to developing these skills. We had discussion forums on the Internet years ago that allowed for contextual replying to others' posts. Even allowing students in a school setting to participate in discussion forums on a local isolated subnet would go a long way to teaching these skills and maybe sap some time away from the much less instructive blogs of social media. The lack of interest in bringing back the discussion forum with a few exceptions, slashdot is one, is an indicator that social media businesses do not want thinking customers.
The first rule of business, adjective "ruthless" is redundant, is to create a captive market which is something both Micro$oft and Google are about. You do this so you can lock in your customers to your product or service and ask for ransom if they want to leave. The only reasonable answer is to either steal the product or create a workalike that makes the functionality non-unique. This is what Open-Office and LibreOffice represent WRT Microsoft Office and why Microsoft has to roll new releases each year. You get maybe 90% of the functioality in the workalikes but the market share is retained by human nature; people are afraid to drop their addiction to Word, nuch of that due to conservative business leadership than actual functional utility.
For a company whose motto, "Do no Evil." the situation of Google Docs is a disgrace. Not only is the product really a closed standard, it is based on open standards not enforced, or bastardized just enough to make them closed, that is evil. It also reveals another important seduction of business, creating convenience. People use Google Docs because it is easy to get started with, now exporting their work may be an entirely different problem, but that is what a captive market is for,
Were it not for a persistent cursor positioning bug in Google Chromium under Ubuntu, I might be trying to write open source code using Google Docs, but I would never use their WYSIWYG formats. So Google has shot itself in the foot.
Sounds like ditto for "We can make everyone program.". I can do more with org,mode in emacs and even more with ipython notebook to make compelling interactive presentation or documents than was ever possible with PowerPoint, cute graphics notwithstanding. Still, there are simple rules about not cluttering slides with too many points and using a large font to keep it simple, stupid, that lay the traps for most presentations. That is no fault of PowerPoint of its ilk.
For years and years the bathametry off the islands was classified. The reason was that our submarines would hide in the oddly rugged land forms of the subsurface. The lay of the sea floor was declassified when it was felt that our enemies had already mapped it. When the data were made available they unleashed a bonanza of geologic investigation for it became clear that there was a very active process taking place. Much of the strange forms around the islands, all of them, are due to very large slumps, where entire sides of volcanos slumped beneath the ocean suddenly, in a day or less.
I remember being at Wyanii on the west, dry leeward, coast of Oahu and seeing hundreds of individual lava flows in the rugged mountain side. Later I learned that one of the huge blocks that subsided from the coast sat right off shore and realized that the landscape could have been created in an instant as the west edge of the pile slipped off into the deep sea to its west. The ocean off the Islands is more than 3,000 feet deep.
On the east coast of the Big Island is a very active volcano that has been putting out floods of low viscosity basalt to its east. There is also a huge gravity fault that has opened up a miles long rift that faces east. One of these days the whole cubic miles of rock could side off to the east into the abyss. I fear that the wave created will destroy everything on the east edge of the Pacific Basin. I have thought that one might look at places on the West Coast of the U.S. for evidence of the mega wave that could result, because it has happened before many times.
So this is a projector the size of a small cube with a general purpose computer inside? Now add a laser that can scan the projected area for a virtual keyboard and pointing device and you have a desktop. Compress the whole into a smart phone form factor and you have a mobile device that no longer has to deal with that small display and keyboard. You have a system that is a powerful as a low end desktop and you put Facebook and blogs out of business because you no longer have to restrict the size of a text area and how much a person could write, we get our Free Speech back.
Virtual keyboards and pointing device already exists. There is at least one device that I have seen which paints a 101 keyboard on a table top with a laser that you can type at. Getting rid of the small screen seems only a simple evolution. This is exactly what I had hoped would happen.
I remember when Hewlett-Packard had very high employee loyalty and retention, when it was famous for treating its employees very well, better than most public companies. I am not surprised by what has happened and I can blame HP's senior management for this and the ilk in most boards and executive boards of companies whose backgrounds are finance and who listen to Wall Street analysts. This is why I would love to see Business Schools and Economics Departments discredited intellectually and academically beginning at Stanford and Harvard, for spreading lies and half truths that people use to conceal selfishness and shortsightedness. This is one of the reasons I went out of my way to vote against Whitman when she ran for Governor in California, not only was she a pro-business Republican but having sat on boards of many companies, the only perspective she has on decision-making is to look at financial reports. What the OP said is true to form and is as much the reason American business does not serve the needs of the citizens of this country and why it looks to offshore labor. I would
like to see leaders like Whitman discredited, for not leading.
The smart-ass answer is that it isn't GPS because the "S" as in "satellite" isn't used. The other issue is that the geomagnetic field is not stable, it changes rapidly over snort time scales, so how is it reliable enough to provide a stable grid? I don't get that.
On the other hand, go back a couple of decades and recall how surveyors made maps, and still do, incidentally. Geophysists measure tectonic strain in rocks by using lasers to measure distances between targets across active faults to milimeter tolerances. Not using satellites complicates that only a little, by requiring more control points on the geodesic grid. It is still possible to get order of magnitude accuracy without satellites. The satellites have reduced the cost to get wide area controls, so we are entering the phase where the satellite system is aging to fail and the replacement cost is high, so either we get back into the business of orbiting large things or we find the alternative.
Reserves are not production, they are an estimate of what is possible to extract using available technology.
The Monterey Shale is a silica-rich sulfur-rich unit of Middle Miocene age that probably formed in off-shore abyssal silt at the foot of the continental slope. Its current distribution is due to displacement along the San Andreas system which moved some of it, including the type locality in Monterey County as much as 350 KM NW on the west side of the SAF (On the Salinian Block) . Originally, in Miocene time, the environment of deposition was mostly in what is today Southern California including a large region the south end of the Great Valley which was a deep sea environment open to the south before the creation of the Tehachapi and Temblor Mountains. These were thrust up by an effort of the SAF to strighten itself out after the main shear zone jumped east along the Gulf of California and Salton Trough about 6 MYA.
The reason to give this thumbnail of the geology is to point out that unlike the continuous layer-cake geology of the oil shales of the Mid-West, where hydraulic fracturing is economical, the tectonically complex geology of the Monterey Shale may very much limit the productivity of the frakking technology that is being applied to it. At the same time oil has been produced for decades from places where basins and thrust faults are traps, mostly in Southern California, but the reserves are somewhat depleted by now. Many people have forgotten that for a time in the early decades of the 20th California was the leading oil producer in the country before the big discoveries were made in Texas and Alaska. Oil in Southern California generated the capital the funded the movie industry, and is probably the driving force behind Conservative politics there.
Estimating reserves is a black art that can change rapidly due to economic factors. so if investors were interested in buying leases on the Monterey Shale in California thinking that the geology was the same as out in North Dakota and they financed wells and paid to inject fluids and expected to get the same production, then like many events in economic history, the claims and the me-too factor was over stated. I can understand because of the geology how the pay off to produce from the Monterey might be less than optimists expect. Even so, maybe producing from the Great Valley part of the formation might be less risky owing to the more continuous geology of the region east of the SAF. Still, production from the Borderland Province as in the Ventura Basin from the Monterey has been fairly continuous if not enough to meet the rosey expectations. and that is more traditional oil production than hydraulic fracturing.
the experienced developer invalidated the plans and processes of the manager, exposed him for the fool he is, and convinced the manager that if he hires him, everyone will know this too.
Interview questions are minefields for experienced, competent individuals, because one never knows the relevance of an answer.
Yeah, I had a similar experience, I stood up to a younger manager who was incompetent, did not understand the intellectual investment it takes to learn and use software tools, compilers and OSs. He thought that when he talked everybody should jump, military style. The trouble was that he hadn't really earned his stars, he was a rear-guard admiral. Anyway, he was the product of a failing management. He mouthed off to me and I took leave and about $100,000 off the bottom line and the upshot is that the company he worked for was bought out maybe six years later. The stock had tumbled from a high of $127 to more like $3,
So, there are plenty of tricks and deceptions out there but time winnows the talkers from the doers, and that is continuing as we shall see yet again, and soon when the next bubble bursts.
And so, the flip side is that software development is a very specialized skill that only a small percentage of the population can do, and that ideas that "programming" should be a larger part of education for everybody is probably a waste on two counts, only a small number of people would be very good at it, and of there is age discrimination going on in the pool of candidates for developer jobs that there cannot be an under supply of developers as many business peopele and now politicians claim. This can be explained by manipulation of labor costs. Companies don't hire grey beards because they are afraid of the insurance liability, and they con't want to pay to retrain people, so their must be an oversupply of developers, enough people can do the productive jobs.
The companies and politicians claiming that there is a shortage must be saying that because without the supply of young and foreign workers they would have to pay more. I don't know if this is penny wise and pound foolish, for surely there is a core of experience in people who have practiced in a field for longer that is not lost because fads change. If you learned to code in an old declarative language, you might be able to spot pitfalls that a newer programmer in a procedural or functional language misses. It would be interesting to track the real productivity of a programmer who was ready the day he was hired on with the specific needs of the job against that of an older person who had experience but needed to retrain for the specific framework. A war in Europe may force that test to be made.
The social and economic solution to that is coming in the form of a tech bubble burst, which may be part of another financial bubble. You see, the problems that led to the meltdown of 2008 haven't really been fixed and you may be set up for a bunch of boom-bust cycles because of imbalances in the world economy and the concentration of wealth. Tech workers are a major cause of this, even unwittingly, and there is going to be major blow-back on them, and on the companies that employ them; in fact, it may already be happening and the reaction is going to get worse, I think.
It wouldn't take much to upset the apple cart, and even if some of the historical precedents that are already in place don't operate. A shooting war in Europe would demand that many young people be drafted to serve in time of war. If tech companies survive the beginning of war, they would surely have to use older workers and pay to retrain them. This says nothing about less extreme possibilities. I think that change is inevitable and that to assume that the present is stable is foolish.
Yeah, I'll bet that you don't live in Silicon Valley. You probably are working at a MilSpec house where because it is government procurement you still have to support legacy systems. Am I right? Suppose you are one of those unsung defense contractors who happens to be in Silicon Valley, it may be hard for another grey beard to come work with you, even though I have written FORTRAN and know the UNIX shell, because the wait to get clearances is so long. And in light of the NSA problem I'd be weary of what I wanted to get clearances for.
Except of course every company is prey to flight of investment, no matter how wise its management thinks it is. Another thing is, where do you think all the pimply faced young people will be if we were to suddenly find ourselves in a shooting war in Europe? They, most of them, would become canon fodder. If the coming tech bubble doesn't come and the companies survive either an economic disaster or a nuclear exchange, companies like Apple and others will suddenly find themselves needing old guys, and they will have to pay to upgrade their skills.
So, for the time being, you are right, labor law has no teeth in this country, to protect the security of any employees, but don't celebrate the fact as if you are a Republican or worse, things can change quite rapidly, and suddenly those companies getting away with immoral practices will suddenly have to rebuild good will, if they survive so long. Maybe if we go through another financial meltdown, possibly the stock markets are bubbles right now, and there is a bubble in tech, or a major war, then Google, counting clicks, will matter less and less and newer companies will arise with different priorities. That may be the price we have to pay to make your version of status quo invalid. So don't bet on the future without some insight as to alternative possibilities.
If idiots are telling developers what to do and how to do it, then maybe the next question is what tasks the idiots and their investors think is so important to do? I have become profoundly skeptical about the whole business model process and the people who drive it. If you think that the Peter Principal applies then your development manager does his job because he can't do your job, and so on up the chain. And if you think that planning and conception of the business model is done up the chain, then the competence of those people decreases up the chain until the only wisdom in the process is that the CEO can read quarterly accounting reports. he has no further insight than that, and that of the board is even less, they are even more beholden to the myths of accounting and the bottom line, which is where the analysts who evaluate the public equities sit, they are even less informed. I worked at a major computer company years ago where the CEO and board paid too much attention to the whims of the Wall-Street Analysts and the financial industry clients the company had. This company, who is a name you would recognize is no more, it was bought out, and when you realize that the growth and fall of technology companies is due in part to flim-flam, and to decisions by people who know nothing, then get ready for another bubble. I knew back in 2006 that tech would blow another bubble when the rage was monetizing click counts, and I laughed, and I continue to laugh because that is what all this brilliance in computer science comes to, Google. So as in 2000 we may yet hear the woosh as capital flees from tech companies, and this time I rooting for the bust.
Politicians in California are all on the bandwagon about teaching students to program, let alone computer science. The reason for the flat interest in CS is that very few people in the population can do CS or should, and that not many more can write programs of any value. The idea that you can teach everybody to do programming is just wrong. It is roughly the same problem as teaching people to do mathematics of any depth or write fugues. Very few people will ever master either, and the percentages of people who are good computer scientists, or mathematicians or composers of music is pretty small and costant.
You might be able to teach more people how to use computers, even how to manage them, just as you can teach many more people some competance in quantative thinking, or how to listen to musical form. The idea of at least one Congressional candidate who comes from Stanford School of Economics that every child should learn something about how to code, or a similar idea from the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, is just a stupid pipe dream. If they wanted to really prepare students, they should teach them how to use technology, but maybe their resources would be better used to teach students to think and write critically. Judging by the traffic on social media they are doing neither and maybe that is what the business leaders really want.
Of course the other side of the coin is the unfulfilled promise of the digital revolution that it would enable everybody. That has not happened and I think that one of the reasons for the lopsided income distribution in the economy and the accompanying political elites is that CS and programming are skills for an elite. They are not skills that a majority of people can use. So, the argument about automating work so that more and more people are marginalized from their traditional jobs has not been met with compensating opportunity and the earning power of most has declined as that of the technical elite has raised. This is resulting, not going to happen, but happening right now, in push-back on the elites who have been given free reign in places like the San Francisco Bay Area. That is going to continue as the perception that the venture capitalists investors and tech firms don't really benefit the lives of but a very few and at the expense of a large majority.
HP tried this during the tech (real estate and traffic) boom of the mid 1980's. Moved a whole bunch of R&D and operations to Roseville and other environs near Sacto. Pretty much for the same reasons.
A failed experiment.
The SF/Silicon Valley area occasionally succeeds because of pure critical mass, it's density of top research universities, tech talent, and crazy people with more money than sense. Very few other "corridors" continue to put that much money into crazy people's ventures.
Yeah, and the hell with 'em all, Go somewhere else, now, you worn out your welcome and spoiled it for everyone else. Take your elitism and schemes, and do them somewhere else. I live to see plum orchards come back to San Jose, although I fear now that what was one some of the most productive farm land in the world has been forever poisoned by the greed of chip makers and will take centuries to recover. The again, maybe the 10 meters of sea level rise that is being peidicted when ice collapses will solve that, or a large earthquake in San Jose, will destroy infrastructure. Fortunately, you are all living in a fool's paradise and I laugh at all you big plans and schemes.
Business in the Bay Area is like trying to shove 10 pounds of shit int a 5 pound bag, and the investors who are driving this don't care about its impact on housing, on traffic, etc. and that most of the people who live here don't benefit at all from their efforts. I am hoping that companies start leaving the Bay Area in droves, even as politicians of either party bend over and spread for the billionaires, fuck 'em all. I no longer accept the notion that high tech is good for this area even despite its history. I would love to see public opinion turn against Silicon Valley and the Universities that made it possible, especially Stanford, and the rich kids who are venture capitalists, send them packing to Austin or Huston, Give Texas a taste of its own medicine.
Is the discussion about Th 233 really a Red Herring? I have discovered that when an article takes a prejudged position that the writer glosses over the biased point very quickly, begging the question, and quickly moving off to the main point, a distraction. So, that the reader will not pay attention to his weak rhetoric. I don't know the merits of the discussion about Th 233, even if it has high activity. But it could be a distraction from the crux of the argument about use of Thorium which is the claim that it is too expensive to use.
Now arguments about cost are particularly weak. They may be based only on lack of human effort, and may only say that no one has looked into a process or an approach that drastically changes, reduces the cost. The problem with Th vs. U and Pu in nuclear energy is that the investment has been in high pressure water cooled reactors using enriched U, with about twice or three times the ratio of U 235 to U 238, that were promoted by the AEC in the 1950's because of the yield of Pu for weapons grade nukes. The nuclear industry has sunk costs in this technology and doesn't want someone coming along and claiming that a resource like Th would make a better, safer, cheaper choice, and the cost argument is simply a reflection of where the investment has taken place, and where the established interests want to protect their investment,
This is exactly the same weak argument used by the carbon energy industry about renewable energy sources, they are too expensive. Lots of hidden agenda can be hidden behind economics arguments, as the main reason the renewables are too expensive is that the electric grid is not built out to places where they are plentiful; the grid is managed by utility companies that have made a huge investment in carbon based fuels. They would rather ship highly dangerous crude oil from fracked shales all over the country on decaying and rickety railroads than spend money on renewables.
I am skeptical about some of the claims I've heard about Th as well, but an article that perports informative and fair facts that uses obvious rhetorical tricks does not help the discussion in a day and age where every special interest tries to bend facts and where social media becomes a forum for public relations and propaganda. Finding distortion in recounting of facts becomes at least as important as the facts themselves and demands objective and unbiased sources for the facts.
The issue is, can Th be used in place of Enriched U to generate energy in portable unpressured reactors that are much safer than current technology? There is many times the amount of Th than there is U, it can be mined from common accessory minerals from granite, such as monazite and even sphene, and it does not produce as much fissile isotopes of U or Pu that could be used in weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice tautology, now offer some connincing argument. Sounding too smug doesn't support the assertion. It just sounds like you are trying to dismiss an underlying problem like a moral failing, like a poor philosophy. Just saying "That's business" does not justify anything, In fact it can seem like an evasion of responsibility. Evading responsibility is a big part of the problem. People who make decisions aren't suffering the consequences and aren't being held accountable, not even if purely accounting terms as if that were objective and obeyed conservation laws. So wealth does not obey conservation, does it.
Americans are anti-intellectual for being too pragmatic and now, too unproductive, not from the criteria of wealth or its distribution but from just not doing anything useful. The case in point is finance and administration, generally, not just in schools but in business and government generally. We need to rediscover useful work. Someone mentioned PhD Mathematicians making 6 figures working as quants. Isn't that a totally cynical waste of time and useless speculation and greed? Shouldn't people make better use of their talent and time. If Americans can find no higher calling that that or using computer science to push social media marketing schemes. then maybe they deserve what is happening to them. I wish America could have a Cultural Revolution: force all the business and finance and administrators to have to work in the fields harvesting vegetables and fruits for a living. who knows people with those backgrounds are making such poor decisions that the environmental catastrophies they are bringing down on all of use might make them have to literally scrape to survive in just that way. I think that much of the evil in the world is due to the thinking that comes out of business schools and the pragmatism of Americans generally, that wisdom is traded for easy gain and that we have sold out morally to people who will continue to screw us. Capitalism run amok, not solved by deregulating markets. When government gets out of regulating markets, organized crime takes over. We must be responsible for each other and to each other and begin to think of consequences beyond the next fiscal quarter.
Slashdot Beta is not the answer. It is regression to the failing standard of the average blog post as set by Google and Facebook and all those sites the OP is suggesting needs improvement. As long as it is the site owners who want to be in control of discussions, we may not progress very far, but if they are really interesting is sparking discussion then they must introduce features of older discussion forums and features of USENET, meaning user-settable topics, context quoting, and forking of subthreads. Context quoting with percentage reply to quote rule is easy to do and can be done now in blogs that adopt Markdown and use a perl or javascript program to enforce the ratio. Longer topic lines with some kind of context threading is only a little more difficult.
The key is user control of context and that is exactly the feature missing in the major blogs and social media sites. That make it easy for marketers to mine posts but it is damaging to discussion and is why in the area of social activism social media is so shallow, dealing only with simple impulsive issues that have no long-term sustainability. In order to sustain a discussion or an issue with any complexity something more complex than social media blogs needs to be done. Even something as straight forward as USENET discussion forums on a web interface would be a big step in this direction. I am talking about the text-based forums. The abuses of the binary groups could be solved by only allowing links.
It is important to realize why discussions don't really effectively take place on sites like Google+ and Facebook, and why even Google Groups is a poor interface to the USENET groups it ports to. The reason is the blog model that does not support the complexity needed for a real discussion.
This is the main reason why I oppose Slashdot Beta, because it weakens the complexity needed for discussion to go any where and the reason Dice is pushing it is for the marketing opportunity presented by what is more of a blog-like structure. Maybe marketers and business people aren't smart enough to deal with contextual discussions, but I'll tell you what, the future of democratic institutions may depend on there being extensive discussions. like have occurred on Slashdot, and that business people who want to "simplify" things may reveal how tyrannical and anti-democratic they truly are, The blog my have been adopted innocently because of the ease of web coding to get blocks of text from Javascript textareas, but it could have been more sinister than that in the scale of the social media sites, an intentional desire to dumb-down discourse in the world for political control. Death to blogs!
Sounds to me like the Miocene version was a ticking time bomb, though.
It is far worse than that and when you consider what is bad about speculation then you have to return to the whole process of assigning value to capital assets. So, if finance is just a game then where smart guys get profits, companies and the whole economy are hurt because something useful does not get done, financial assets have no intrinsic value by themselves. In addition the emphasis on short-term ROI takes away the ability of a company to be managed astutely. It is almost as though to become a public company makes your operation a scam, and the bubble in stock prices shows that. The catch is that like value in social media, stock prices represent a subjective and self-serving process where analysts invent impressions out of thin air that investors mistake for real value.
I worked for a computer company that is no more. When I joined it the stock price was about $7. It peaked at $127 and by the time it was bought out the stock was worth about $3. I was long gone by then, but I remember that the CEO threatened to buy back the company and make it private late in the game. The thing I was too stupid to realize is that many of the customers in banking and finance probably used the high performing servers for HFT, and to that end speculation driven by this type of finance probably undermined the company. I believe that it was the computer revolution itself that created the monster, greed loves speed, which is why the emphasis on short-term ROI was driven by the speed of transactions.
I was at Sun from 1997 to 2004 and there were good and bad times. I saw my first Sun 3 in 1988 thereaboouts and did some development work. C and shell, and then system admin of small LANs for a couple of start-ups and research operations and a couple of tech support roles. It was tech support I did at Sun mostly supporting Solaris and later legacy compilers. I left Sun because the emphasis had moved away from Solaris and on to Java and related tools. I felt that the APIs were poorly designed, too big, and complex. For me, as a visually impaired person the coding conventions in Java were hard to deal with and the language hard to use from a support role. I had been supporting the OS and legacy compilers and found Java to be an annoyance. I also felt that Sun was playing catch-up to other IDEs at the time and not doing too well. Later, Netbeans would look competitive to me, but not back in 2004. I think that the shift after 2003 and the emphasis on Java was what killed Sun. I think that Sun could have made more revenue from the FORTRAN compiler and legacy tools than it ever did from Java and that it mstepped and paid the price. I never liked Oracle and Larry Ellison and wonder how the HW guys are faring in that scam. Sun might have prospered if it pushed Solaris more on X86 and it failed because it let technology beat performance of its SPARC platform. I am not sure that Oracle can do better.
I couldn't agree with you more. The importance of teaching and your profession is unsung, and the denigration comes at the hands of conservatives in business who know full well that they do not want a population that can see through the marketing and propaganda bullshit that drives consumerism, social media, and business. These conservatives who attack teachers and their unions also know that public workers get more selective attention because of legitimate scrutiny that their own for-profit businesses would not allow and just claims that their employees and the management produce just as much dangerous and interior products, the case of the auto makers comes to mind, that for profit it's OK to screw people but dare not any public employee get a break.
Besides that is the rising tide of elitism in the current economic and political system and the threat a sane educational system would actually promote more inclusion and citizenship than elites, especially Conservatives want. That is as much a factor in the huge inflation of the cost of a college education and why so many students are in hock. The net effect is that America becomes less democratic and as the economic system becomes more exclusive so does the political system. America could lose all of its inclusive political institutions. A sound education prepares young people to assume citizenship in an inclusive and open society. I think than many critics of teaching do not want that. They want privileged elites, they want an exploitative economics and politics, like a Latin American Oligarchy.
I think that part of the plan was to allow for cheap alien workers to so burden the system with their social and language needs, that educators would have to spend so much time catering to minorities that the higher order needs of making well-reasoned citizens would be diluted. Why have consumers who can argue with you when you get cheap labor that is just so thankful to be here that they will do whatever you tell them to at half the price? That is why Congress has been so reluctant to do real immegration reform and secure our border with Latin America, particulary. I am not blaming the people from south of the border; they have a right to get from us what they want; we make it relatively easy for them, but I think that the fact plays into the hands of business people who want to exploit all of us and keep our school system from functioning in the way it needs to for democratic processes in this country.
Business doesn't necessarily support democratic traditions and the one thing educators can do is to teach students to think critically about well financed persuasion of all sorts, whether from advertising, public relations, propaganda, political rhetoric, manipulation and fragmentation of mass media. I think that at any one time only a small percentage of a population will ever be proficient in technical fields and mathematics. It would be more important to teach most people how to reason and how to write with some basic skill, and technology can be used to help this.
In fact, I have proof of malgeasance on the Internet on this matter of public discussion, or learning to debate and reason. The very medium of social media, the blog, poses a huge impediment to developing these skills. We had discussion forums on the Internet years ago that allowed for contextual replying to others' posts. Even allowing students in a school setting to participate in discussion forums on a local isolated subnet would go a long way to teaching these skills and maybe sap some time away from the much less instructive blogs of social media. The lack of interest in bringing back the discussion forum with a few exceptions, slashdot is one, is an indicator that social media businesses do not want thinking customers.
The first rule of business, adjective "ruthless" is redundant, is to create a captive market which is something both Micro$oft and Google are about. You do this so you can lock in your customers to your product or service and ask for ransom if they want to leave. The only reasonable answer is to either steal the product or create a workalike that makes the functionality non-unique. This is what Open-Office and LibreOffice represent WRT Microsoft Office and why Microsoft has to roll new releases each year. You get maybe 90% of the functioality in the workalikes but the market share is retained by human nature; people are afraid to drop their addiction to Word, nuch of that due to conservative business leadership than actual functional utility.
For a company whose motto, "Do no Evil." the situation of Google Docs is a disgrace. Not only is the product really a closed standard, it is based on open standards not enforced, or bastardized just enough to make them closed, that is evil. It also reveals another important seduction of business, creating convenience. People use Google Docs because it is easy to get started with, now exporting their work may be an entirely different problem, but that is what a captive market is for,
Were it not for a persistent cursor positioning bug in Google Chromium under Ubuntu, I might be trying to write open source code using Google Docs, but I would never use their WYSIWYG formats. So Google has shot itself in the foot.
Sounds like ditto for "We can make everyone program.". I can do more with org,mode in emacs and even more with ipython notebook to make compelling interactive presentation or documents than was ever possible with PowerPoint, cute graphics notwithstanding. Still, there are simple rules about not cluttering slides with too many points and using a large font to keep it simple, stupid, that lay the traps for most presentations. That is no fault of PowerPoint of its ilk.
For years and years the bathametry off the islands was classified. The reason was that our submarines would hide in the oddly rugged land forms of the subsurface. The lay of the sea floor was declassified when it was felt that our enemies had already mapped it. When the data were made available they unleashed a bonanza of geologic investigation for it became clear that there was a very active process taking place. Much of the strange forms around the islands, all of them, are due to very large slumps, where entire sides of volcanos slumped beneath the ocean suddenly, in a day or less.
I remember being at Wyanii on the west, dry leeward, coast of Oahu and seeing hundreds of individual lava flows in the rugged mountain side. Later I learned that one of the huge blocks that subsided from the coast sat right off shore and realized that the landscape could have been created in an instant as the west edge of the pile slipped off into the deep sea to its west. The ocean off the Islands is more than 3,000 feet deep.
On the east coast of the Big Island is a very active volcano that has been putting out floods of low viscosity basalt to its east. There is also a huge gravity fault that has opened up a miles long rift that faces east. One of these days the whole cubic miles of rock could side off to the east into the abyss. I fear that the wave created will destroy everything on the east edge of the Pacific Basin. I have thought that one might look at places on the West Coast of the U.S. for evidence of the mega wave that could result, because it has happened before many times.
So this is a projector the size of a small cube with a general purpose computer inside? Now add a laser that can scan the projected area for a virtual keyboard and pointing device and you have a desktop. Compress the whole into a smart phone form factor and you have a mobile device that no longer has to deal with that small display and keyboard. You have a system that is a powerful as a low end desktop and you put Facebook and blogs out of business because you no longer have to restrict the size of a text area and how much a person could write, we get our Free Speech back.
Virtual keyboards and pointing device already exists. There is at least one device that I have seen which paints a 101 keyboard on a table top with a laser that you can type at. Getting rid of the small screen seems only a simple evolution. This is exactly what I had hoped would happen.
I remember when Hewlett-Packard had very high employee loyalty and retention, when it was famous for treating its employees very well, better than most public companies. I am not surprised by what has happened and I can blame HP's senior management for this and the ilk in most boards and executive boards of companies whose backgrounds are finance and who listen to Wall Street analysts. This is why I would love to see Business Schools and Economics Departments discredited intellectually and academically beginning at Stanford and Harvard, for spreading lies and half truths that people use to conceal selfishness and shortsightedness. This is one of the reasons I went out of my way to vote against Whitman when she ran for Governor in California, not only was she a pro-business Republican but having sat on boards of many companies, the only perspective she has on decision-making is to look at financial reports. What the OP said is true to form and is as much the reason American business does not serve the needs of the citizens of this country and why it looks to offshore labor. I would like to see leaders like Whitman discredited, for not leading.
The smart-ass answer is that it isn't GPS because the "S" as in "satellite" isn't used. The other issue is that the geomagnetic field is not stable, it changes rapidly over snort time scales, so how is it reliable enough to provide a stable grid? I don't get that.
On the other hand, go back a couple of decades and recall how surveyors made maps, and still do, incidentally. Geophysists measure tectonic strain in rocks by using lasers to measure distances between targets across active faults to milimeter tolerances. Not using satellites complicates that only a little, by requiring more control points on the geodesic grid. It is still possible to get order of magnitude accuracy without satellites. The satellites have reduced the cost to get wide area controls, so we are entering the phase where the satellite system is aging to fail and the replacement cost is high, so either we get back into the business of orbiting large things or we find the alternative.
Reserves are not production, they are an estimate of what is possible to extract using available technology.
The Monterey Shale is a silica-rich sulfur-rich unit of Middle Miocene age that probably formed in off-shore abyssal silt at the foot of the continental slope. Its current distribution is due to displacement along the San Andreas system which moved some of it, including the type locality in Monterey County as much as 350 KM NW on the west side of the SAF (On the Salinian Block) . Originally, in Miocene time, the environment of deposition was mostly in what is today Southern California including a large region the south end of the Great Valley which was a deep sea environment open to the south before the creation of the Tehachapi and Temblor Mountains. These were thrust up by an effort of the SAF to strighten itself out after the main shear zone jumped east along the Gulf of California and Salton Trough about 6 MYA.
The reason to give this thumbnail of the geology is to point out that unlike the continuous layer-cake geology of the oil shales of the Mid-West, where hydraulic fracturing is economical, the tectonically complex geology of the Monterey Shale may very much limit the productivity of the frakking technology that is being applied to it. At the same time oil has been produced for decades from places where basins and thrust faults are traps, mostly in Southern California, but the reserves are somewhat depleted by now. Many people have forgotten that for a time in the early decades of the 20th California was the leading oil producer in the country before the big discoveries were made in Texas and Alaska. Oil in Southern California generated the capital the funded the movie industry, and is probably the driving force behind Conservative politics there.
Estimating reserves is a black art that can change rapidly due to economic factors. so if investors were interested in buying leases on the Monterey Shale in California thinking that the geology was the same as out in North Dakota and they financed wells and paid to inject fluids and expected to get the same production, then like many events in economic history, the claims and the me-too factor was over stated. I can understand because of the geology how the pay off to produce from the Monterey might be less than optimists expect. Even so, maybe producing from the Great Valley part of the formation might be less risky owing to the more continuous geology of the region east of the SAF. Still, production from the Borderland Province as in the Ventura Basin from the Monterey has been fairly continuous if not enough to meet the rosey expectations. and that is more traditional oil production than hydraulic fracturing.
the experienced developer invalidated the plans and processes of the manager, exposed him for the fool he is, and convinced the manager that if he hires him, everyone will know this too.
Interview questions are minefields for experienced, competent individuals, because one never knows the relevance of an answer.
Yeah, I had a similar experience, I stood up to a younger manager who was incompetent, did not understand the intellectual investment it takes to learn and use software tools, compilers and OSs. He thought that when he talked everybody should jump, military style. The trouble was that he hadn't really earned his stars, he was a rear-guard admiral. Anyway, he was the product of a failing management. He mouthed off to me and I took leave and about $100,000 off the bottom line and the upshot is that the company he worked for was bought out maybe six years later. The stock had tumbled from a high of $127 to more like $3,
So, there are plenty of tricks and deceptions out there but time winnows the talkers from the doers, and that is continuing as we shall see yet again, and soon when the next bubble bursts.
And so, the flip side is that software development is a very specialized skill that only a small percentage of the population can do, and that ideas that "programming" should be a larger part of education for everybody is probably a waste on two counts, only a small number of people would be very good at it, and of there is age discrimination going on in the pool of candidates for developer jobs that there cannot be an under supply of developers as many business peopele and now politicians claim. This can be explained by manipulation of labor costs. Companies don't hire grey beards because they are afraid of the insurance liability, and they con't want to pay to retrain people, so their must be an oversupply of developers, enough people can do the productive jobs.
The companies and politicians claiming that there is a shortage must be saying that because without the supply of young and foreign workers they would have to pay more. I don't know if this is penny wise and pound foolish, for surely there is a core of experience in people who have practiced in a field for longer that is not lost because fads change. If you learned to code in an old declarative language, you might be able to spot pitfalls that a newer programmer in a procedural or functional language misses. It would be interesting to track the real productivity of a programmer who was ready the day he was hired on with the specific needs of the job against that of an older person who had experience but needed to retrain for the specific framework. A war in Europe may force that test to be made.
The social and economic solution to that is coming in the form of a tech bubble burst, which may be part of another financial bubble. You see, the problems that led to the meltdown of 2008 haven't really been fixed and you may be set up for a bunch of boom-bust cycles because of imbalances in the world economy and the concentration of wealth. Tech workers are a major cause of this, even unwittingly, and there is going to be major blow-back on them, and on the companies that employ them; in fact, it may already be happening and the reaction is going to get worse, I think.
It wouldn't take much to upset the apple cart, and even if some of the historical precedents that are already in place don't operate. A shooting war in Europe would demand that many young people be drafted to serve in time of war. If tech companies survive the beginning of war, they would surely have to use older workers and pay to retrain them. This says nothing about less extreme possibilities. I think that change is inevitable and that to assume that the present is stable is foolish.
Yeah, I'll bet that you don't live in Silicon Valley. You probably are working at a MilSpec house where because it is government procurement you still have to support legacy systems. Am I right? Suppose you are one of those unsung defense contractors who happens to be in Silicon Valley, it may be hard for another grey beard to come work with you, even though I have written FORTRAN and know the UNIX shell, because the wait to get clearances is so long. And in light of the NSA problem I'd be weary of what I wanted to get clearances for.
Except of course every company is prey to flight of investment, no matter how wise its management thinks it is. Another thing is, where do you think all the pimply faced young people will be if we were to suddenly find ourselves in a shooting war in Europe? They, most of them, would become canon fodder. If the coming tech bubble doesn't come and the companies survive either an economic disaster or a nuclear exchange, companies like Apple and others will suddenly find themselves needing old guys, and they will have to pay to upgrade their skills.
So, for the time being, you are right, labor law has no teeth in this country, to protect the security of any employees, but don't celebrate the fact as if you are a Republican or worse, things can change quite rapidly, and suddenly those companies getting away with immoral practices will suddenly have to rebuild good will, if they survive so long. Maybe if we go through another financial meltdown, possibly the stock markets are bubbles right now, and there is a bubble in tech, or a major war, then Google, counting clicks, will matter less and less and newer companies will arise with different priorities. That may be the price we have to pay to make your version of status quo invalid. So don't bet on the future without some insight as to alternative possibilities.
If idiots are telling developers what to do and how to do it, then maybe the next question is what tasks the idiots and their investors think is so important to do? I have become profoundly skeptical about the whole business model process and the people who drive it. If you think that the Peter Principal applies then your development manager does his job because he can't do your job, and so on up the chain. And if you think that planning and conception of the business model is done up the chain, then the competence of those people decreases up the chain until the only wisdom in the process is that the CEO can read quarterly accounting reports. he has no further insight than that, and that of the board is even less, they are even more beholden to the myths of accounting and the bottom line, which is where the analysts who evaluate the public equities sit, they are even less informed. I worked at a major computer company years ago where the CEO and board paid too much attention to the whims of the Wall-Street Analysts and the financial industry clients the company had. This company, who is a name you would recognize is no more, it was bought out, and when you realize that the growth and fall of technology companies is due in part to flim-flam, and to decisions by people who know nothing, then get ready for another bubble. I knew back in 2006 that tech would blow another bubble when the rage was monetizing click counts, and I laughed, and I continue to laugh because that is what all this brilliance in computer science comes to, Google. So as in 2000 we may yet hear the woosh as capital flees from tech companies, and this time I rooting for the bust.
Politicians in California are all on the bandwagon about teaching students to program, let alone computer science. The reason for the flat interest in CS is that very few people in the population can do CS or should, and that not many more can write programs of any value. The idea that you can teach everybody to do programming is just wrong. It is roughly the same problem as teaching people to do mathematics of any depth or write fugues. Very few people will ever master either, and the percentages of people who are good computer scientists, or mathematicians or composers of music is pretty small and costant.
You might be able to teach more people how to use computers, even how to manage them, just as you can teach many more people some competance in quantative thinking, or how to listen to musical form. The idea of at least one Congressional candidate who comes from Stanford School of Economics that every child should learn something about how to code, or a similar idea from the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, is just a stupid pipe dream. If they wanted to really prepare students, they should teach them how to use technology, but maybe their resources would be better used to teach students to think and write critically. Judging by the traffic on social media they are doing neither and maybe that is what the business leaders really want.
Of course the other side of the coin is the unfulfilled promise of the digital revolution that it would enable everybody. That has not happened and I think that one of the reasons for the lopsided income distribution in the economy and the accompanying political elites is that CS and programming are skills for an elite. They are not skills that a majority of people can use. So, the argument about automating work so that more and more people are marginalized from their traditional jobs has not been met with compensating opportunity and the earning power of most has declined as that of the technical elite has raised. This is resulting, not going to happen, but happening right now, in push-back on the elites who have been given free reign in places like the San Francisco Bay Area. That is going to continue as the perception that the venture capitalists investors and tech firms don't really benefit the lives of but a very few and at the expense of a large majority.
HP tried this during the tech (real estate and traffic) boom of the mid 1980's. Moved a whole bunch of R&D and operations to Roseville and other environs near Sacto. Pretty much for the same reasons.
A failed experiment.
The SF/Silicon Valley area occasionally succeeds because of pure critical mass, it's density of top research universities, tech talent, and crazy people with more money than sense. Very few other "corridors" continue to put that much money into crazy people's ventures.
Yeah, and the hell with 'em all, Go somewhere else, now, you worn out your welcome and spoiled it for everyone else. Take your elitism and schemes, and do them somewhere else. I live to see plum orchards come back to San Jose, although I fear now that what was one some of the most productive farm land in the world has been forever poisoned by the greed of chip makers and will take centuries to recover. The again, maybe the 10 meters of sea level rise that is being peidicted when ice collapses will solve that, or a large earthquake in San Jose, will destroy infrastructure. Fortunately, you are all living in a fool's paradise and I laugh at all you big plans and schemes.
Let Rick Parry have 'em all.
Business in the Bay Area is like trying to shove 10 pounds of shit int a 5 pound bag, and the investors who are driving this don't care about its impact on housing, on traffic, etc. and that most of the people who live here don't benefit at all from their efforts. I am hoping that companies start leaving the Bay Area in droves, even as politicians of either party bend over and spread for the billionaires, fuck 'em all. I no longer accept the notion that high tech is good for this area even despite its history. I would love to see public opinion turn against Silicon Valley and the Universities that made it possible, especially Stanford, and the rich kids who are venture capitalists, send them packing to Austin or Huston, Give Texas a taste of its own medicine.
Is the discussion about Th 233 really a Red Herring? I have discovered that when an article takes a prejudged position that the writer glosses over the biased point very quickly, begging the question, and quickly moving off to the main point, a distraction. So, that the reader will not pay attention to his weak rhetoric. I don't know the merits of the discussion about Th 233, even if it has high activity. But it could be a distraction from the crux of the argument about use of Thorium which is the claim that it is too expensive to use.
Now arguments about cost are particularly weak. They may be based only on lack of human effort, and may only say that no one has looked into a process or an approach that drastically changes, reduces the cost. The problem with Th vs. U and Pu in nuclear energy is that the investment has been in high pressure water cooled reactors using enriched U, with about twice or three times the ratio of U 235 to U 238, that were promoted by the AEC in the 1950's because of the yield of Pu for weapons grade nukes. The nuclear industry has sunk costs in this technology and doesn't want someone coming along and claiming that a resource like Th would make a better, safer, cheaper choice, and the cost argument is simply a reflection of where the investment has taken place, and where the established interests want to protect their investment,
This is exactly the same weak argument used by the carbon energy industry about renewable energy sources, they are too expensive. Lots of hidden agenda can be hidden behind economics arguments, as the main reason the renewables are too expensive is that the electric grid is not built out to places where they are plentiful; the grid is managed by utility companies that have made a huge investment in carbon based fuels. They would rather ship highly dangerous crude oil from fracked shales all over the country on decaying and rickety railroads than spend money on renewables.
I am skeptical about some of the claims I've heard about Th as well, but an article that perports informative and fair facts that uses obvious rhetorical tricks does not help the discussion in a day and age where every special interest tries to bend facts and where social media becomes a forum for public relations and propaganda. Finding distortion in recounting of facts becomes at least as important as the facts themselves and demands objective and unbiased sources for the facts.
The issue is, can Th be used in place of Enriched U to generate energy in portable unpressured reactors that are much safer than current technology? There is many times the amount of Th than there is U, it can be mined from common accessory minerals from granite, such as monazite and even sphene, and it does not produce as much fissile isotopes of U or Pu that could be used in weapons.