Sensationalism sells. The last thing journalists seem to care about is the truth. But news media just give the media what people want. Ergo, most people don't really want the truth (?)
Thought experiment for you. Pretend you own a company. Would you want it to grow, or would you want it to shrink? Would you want it to keep getting bigger and bigger until you're ideally supplying product to every last man woman and child on earth? Or would you want to supply less product and let a competitor have the market? No, almost every company wants to grow as big as possible. And this means creating more and more jobs that increase in proportion with company size, because most jobs still can't be done by machines (yet).
The industrial revolution raised more people out of poverty than any event in human history. If you honestly don't believe that, maybe you would prefer that we purposely go back to dark age conditions? It's easy, we just destroy technology and medicine etc. Or better yet, let's go back to caveman days. You think society was better before the industrial revolution? Really? REALLY?
It doesn't make sense to say "less demand for labor". Human demand is theoretically infinite. We all would love massive mansions, massive yachts etc. Demand for 'stuff' = demand for 'labor', because 'stuff' is the result of human labor. So potential demand for labor is INFINITE.
Put it another way. Another thought experiment. Pretend you owned ALL the capital in the world. Now pretend there is no "stuff" at all, and that everyone else is unemployed. You want "stuff".. a mansion, a yacht, nice reliable and diverse supply of tasty food, a private jet, some strippers. Gosh, now who can supply those thing? Gee, all those unemployed people - so you get them to WORK by paying them! Conversely, you could decide you don't want them to work - and then you will have no "stuff". The more they work, the more "stuff" you have. Demand is infinite.
From what I can tell, the most successful and profitable companies have also been the ones that hired more and more people, and in cases like Google, even causing wage increase across the industry.
Personally I think the main reason that increased productivity is not leading to correspondingly higher quality of life, is that most productivity increases are being sucked up by corresponding increases in taxation of wealth (and not just absolute taxes, because inflation is also a form of tax). That's why we feel like we're working harder to stand still.
Honestly, in today's society, with cellphones and social networks and geo-location and increasingly ubiquitous connectivity, it's becoming impossible to pull of things like polygamy... I think you'd have to be stupid to even try in this day and age. And it's getting harder by the day. Society has become a lot more panopticon-like relative to 10, 20 years ago.
Because civilized society has agreed that the burden of providing some essential needs for those who cannot afford them should be shared by everybody.
Not everyone has agreed. I don't. Can I opt out? If a majority of the people "agree" that we are going to steal your money, would it make it morally right just because a majority agreed? No, it wouldn't. You can try dress up the crude act of stealing with terms like "civilized" but you're just trying to gild a turd.
(1) Isn't it a bit of a strawman to suggest that the only two possibilities, are either an impossible 100% guarantee of complete affordability, or a complete population crash due to not meeting the 100% guarantee? Don't you think that in real life, while there are no absolutes, people can and do (and reasonably so) deal with approximately probabilities, and that there is a huge range of grey in these probabilities? E.g. I can estimate, statistically, that there is an above 80% chance I will be able to support and raise my child until they are an adult, and that a cost/benefit risk/weight analysis suggests it is reasonable to have kids?
(2) Don't you think that when people say "If you can't afford kids, don't have them", that, as reasonable humans operating with ordinary reasonable human assumptions, that they are not talking in absolutes, but with respect to "reasonable probabilities", rather than interpreting it literally? NOBODY really means or interprets statements like this 100% literally, and that is normal, since we aren't robots, we're humans, and it doesn't cause a miscommunication - pretending it does is false.
(3) People can and DO listen to the "If you can't afford them, don't have them"... this philosophy is engrained into certain sub-cultures of modern society, precisely BECAUSE people keep repeating it. I learned this philosophy from young as a child because I heard many adults say it. And now I practice it. I have one kid, and I calculate what I can afford. So your argument (A) is also false. Sure, not EVERYONE on the ENTIRE PLANET is going to listen. But should we stop teaching a philosophy just because we can't get it through to every last human on the planet?
(4) With so many blatant logical fallacies, how did you get modded up?
Until greed comes along. What gay partners want is not recognition, they are after the pensions and tax benefits that were created for families.
Are you saying that straight couples also then only marry out of greed? I.e. to get those benefits? Or would they marry even if there were no benefits? Your argument is not logical. If gay couples want to marry "out of greed", then it follows that straight couples must also be marrying "out of greed", and I presume your intention wasn't to criticize straight couples. If straight couples are not marrying out of greed, then logically, it means they would get married even if there were not financial benefits (which I think is reasonable to assume). However, if it's reasonable to assume that straight couples would get married even without benfits, then why would it not be reasonable to assume that gay couples would also get married even if there were no financial benefits? Are you claiming that gay couples somehow uniquely don't actually really love each other, they're all just looking for money? It doesn't make sense.
Finally, your argument is also illogical in that the LAST thing that really makes financial sense, is marriage! The modern institution of marriage (and accompanying divorce laws etc.) has financially ruined millions of people. If you want to be fiscally smart, the absolute last thing you will want to do, is marry. Marriage is extremely financially risky.
Millisecond-arbitrage is the least of Goldman's 'evils'. Robbing taxpayers via "stimulus", dodgy bail-outs, and crony corruption at high political levels seem far worse... and that's where they get the cash for the bonuses.
Just using super-computers for millisecond arbitrage doesn't seem too egregious ---- ANYONE can benefit from that, if it's profitable, by just investing their money with Goldman. And if you invest money with an investment firm, wouldn't you want them to manage the money in a way that gives you better returns? Or would you say "I would like lower returns thanks".
But they didn't get so rich from these trading systems, in fact if you recall they LOST a lot of money from their trading arms. That's why they needed the bailouts!
If an employee took Google's search engine and data center management code and used it for personal gain, I would call it "copyright infringement with damages", NOT "stealing", because facts don't actually change just because you get emotional about something. If the personal gain was selling the code to the Chinese government, then there may be other additional crimes, but none of them would be "stealing" either. Google would lose, but the loss wouldn't be due to "theft", the loss would be due to "damages". Try to keep a clear head.
Look, I grew up entirely in the days 'before the Internet', and I promise you that as a child, we had plenty of ways to get access to porn. Getting some of those magazines down from the high shelves? Trivial! Where there's a will there's a way. I don't ever remember any 'nanny-squad' ever busting us for any kind of porn either.
And that was before the Internet. It is pure la-la-land denial if anyone thinks they can somehow even remotely prevent their children from seeing plenty of porn in their childhood.
Amazingly, none of us that I know who grew up looking at porn seems to have been screwed up or harmed by it, they all seem like well-adjusted adults in healthy relationships etc.
As long as those 'general blocking measures' remain in private institutions like corporations, and not government censorship, I don't see that that's a problem.. employees shouldn't really be using company computers and bandwidth to browse porn anyway, and.xxx would be easier to block.
well if it regulated that 'pornographic' sites must be on.xxx and no where else
"If"? Is someone proposing that? If so, then sure, I would heavily disagree with that, that would be a major problem, but I don't see the leap from the creation of.xxx to such an assumption.
A lot of the spending money making America "broke" is on the military, meaning that money is being spent anyway, just that it would otherwise be spent on either peaceful exercises and training, or exiting operations like Afghanistan or Iraq. Therefore it's possible to do something about Qadaffi with zero or nearly zero net additional expenditure. You just fly over and bomb targets in Libya instead of training targets and flights. And the US already has battleships and plenty other troops etc. nearby. While I agree something drastic needs to be done about the consistent budget deficits and alarming national debt, that isn't really an argument here.
The whole thing is a litany of reasoning errors. Like the claim that you wouldn't "need much of a police force". Uhm, no, you'd need a dedicated police force just to enforce no-privacy, because people are going to try get around it all the time - to commit crimes, to try cheat on their spouses, to falsify their own records etc., to migrate there illegally. Especially desperate people who can't get a job because of their bad record are literally pushed into a corner - no money = desperation. And you'd need to build and monitor a huge wall around the city, monitoring every possible way of getting into and out of the city. No, no costs there. You'd need a whole dedicated justice system for 'crimes of committing privacy'.
Personally I just want to be left the hell alone, and it's my right to do so. I would move as far away from this city as possible. Even if costs more to live in my cabin in mountains, or whatever.
You didn't read the article, did you? I quote: "I think that if one could save 30% on basic living expenses, and live in a relatively crime-free area, plenty of volunteers would come forward.".. so yes, he does indeed jump from 30% off insurance premiums
And this isn't a "weird thing to criticize": It's the entire foundation of the thought experiment: I quote again, "This is just an economic thought experiment."
Moreover, what you dismiss as 'weird things to criticize', are actually a pattern of logical fallacies that destroy his argument. This isn't the only reasoning error in his thought experiment. For example:
At tax time, you'd be done before you started. All of your financial activities would be tracked in real time, so your taxes would always be up to date.
Whaaa!? Spoken like someone who has never started their own business. That is absurd on the face of it. If I buy just about any random thing - say, a domain name on my credit card - there is no way to automatically know if that was a personal expense or a business expense.
"The utility said a hydrogen explosion at the nearby No. 3 reactor that occurred Monday morning may have caused a glitch in the cooling system of the No. 2 reactor."
These explosions are firstly such massive structural shocks that the blast could be felt 30 miles away, secondly shoot debris at high speed in all directions, and third, massive chunks of tonnes of concrete rain down randomly on the rest of the plant. All these things can and will cause damage to other components, in unpredictable fashions, e.g.pipe breakages.
Watch the video of the second blast, you can even visibly see huge chunks of concrete raining down back onto the plant (from tens of miles away) - incidentally, on the side of reactor 2.
Nuclear doesn't pollute the biosphere. (Except for the occasional bad accident, but the risks of really bad accidents are actually pretty low, and have been decreasing as plant designs improve. We've had a world full of nuclear power for decades now and apart from one spot on the earth where nobody can live for a while, and a small but non-negligible chance of a second such spot appearing in Japan soon, we seem to be doing OK; the apocalyptic scenarios the nuclear naysayers predicted for decades, haven't come to pass. Even if Fukushima goes worst-case, only a tiny handful of people might die.)
They've got limited staff who have been operating in crisis mode for days of likely working round the clock, are becoming ill from radiation poisoning, expect they may die, many have suffered personal losses recently, and half the country is in turmoil with tens of thousands missing or dead... I would think it's quite possible that some of them are not at their sharpest right now and may make mistakes. The human element is a real factor in plant operation, especially under extreme situations.
Taco's job is to 'stimulate lively online discussion', as such accepted submissions are generally those that 'border on inflammatory, but without being total troll'. I wouldn't call it a 'bias' so much as the job description of running an online discussion forum.
Know what I find even more irritating than the rabid "zomg nuclear, hysteria!!" anti-nuke crowd? The rabid "zomg it's totally safe" crowd, who will absurdly adamantly crow that it's all perfectly normal and safe and nothing to worry about when nuclear power stations frikkin explode in a series of huge blasts that can be seen, heard and felt 30 miles away, while fuel rods partly melt down..
Sometimes, taking the polar opposite of a stupid (e.g. anti-nuke) position, is intelligent. But sometimes, taking the polar opposite of a stupid position, is just being stupid in the opposite direction. This is one of those times.
I am pro-nuke. But I am realistically so, not rabid-cultist deny-there-are-any-risks-whatsoever pro-nuke. Hysterically claiming it's highly dangerous is no worse than hysterically crowing that it is risk-free and safe. No wonder the anti-nukers are jittery. Let's be honest, nuclear power is a somewhat risky business. And even the best of engineering is sometimes no match for operator error.
And sometimes even the most well-intentioned, well-trained experienced operators can make mistakes, for example if - like at Fukushima - they've been working in crisis mode for days on end, are ill from radiation poisoning, no doubt exhausted... know what caused the latest exposure of fuel? Human error.
Nuclear plants are run by humans. Nuclear does carry many risks, it is far from the simplest and most risk-free of human endeavours. Should we become hysterical about them? NO. But should we hysterically deny it carries risks? NO. What we should do is keep those risks in fact-based perspective. So what is the absolutely worst case scenario at Fukushima? Seemingly, that maybe a relatively tiny number of people die or get sick (especially compared to e.g. the number that die or get sick from coal power production), and that a portion of Japan say 30 miles radius in Japan becomes unlivable for a thousand years. Would that be the end of the world? No, not at all. Life will go on just fine for everyone. Basically the whole town will survive and be healthy. But the risk does exist of it happening. I remain pro-nuke, but hysterically exaggerating the safety of, or playing down the risks involved in nuclear power production does NOT help the pro-nuke case. In fact it does the opposite, because the anti-nuke people see it and picture folks like that - living in denial that there are risks - running these plants.
So you are saying it was stupid and pointless evacuating hundreds of thousands of people? "Hey townsfolk, don't worry, come back, the evacuation was a mistake, there is no danger, ha ha"
Slashdot Mirror
Sensationalism sells. The last thing journalists seem to care about is the truth. But news media just give the media what people want. Ergo, most people don't really want the truth (?)
Thought experiment for you. Pretend you own a company. Would you want it to grow, or would you want it to shrink? Would you want it to keep getting bigger and bigger until you're ideally supplying product to every last man woman and child on earth? Or would you want to supply less product and let a competitor have the market? No, almost every company wants to grow as big as possible. And this means creating more and more jobs that increase in proportion with company size, because most jobs still can't be done by machines (yet).
The industrial revolution raised more people out of poverty than any event in human history. If you honestly don't believe that, maybe you would prefer that we purposely go back to dark age conditions? It's easy, we just destroy technology and medicine etc. Or better yet, let's go back to caveman days. You think society was better before the industrial revolution? Really? REALLY?
It doesn't make sense to say "less demand for labor". Human demand is theoretically infinite. We all would love massive mansions, massive yachts etc. Demand for 'stuff' = demand for 'labor', because 'stuff' is the result of human labor. So potential demand for labor is INFINITE.
Put it another way. Another thought experiment. Pretend you owned ALL the capital in the world. Now pretend there is no "stuff" at all, and that everyone else is unemployed. You want "stuff" .. a mansion, a yacht, nice reliable and diverse supply of tasty food, a private jet, some strippers. Gosh, now who can supply those thing? Gee, all those unemployed people - so you get them to WORK by paying them! Conversely, you could decide you don't want them to work - and then you will have no "stuff". The more they work, the more "stuff" you have. Demand is infinite.
Except proverbialcow is correct.
From what I can tell, the most successful and profitable companies have also been the ones that hired more and more people, and in cases like Google, even causing wage increase across the industry.
Personally I think the main reason that increased productivity is not leading to correspondingly higher quality of life, is that most productivity increases are being sucked up by corresponding increases in taxation of wealth (and not just absolute taxes, because inflation is also a form of tax). That's why we feel like we're working harder to stand still.
Honestly, in today's society, with cellphones and social networks and geo-location and increasingly ubiquitous connectivity, it's becoming impossible to pull of things like polygamy ... I think you'd have to be stupid to even try in this day and age. And it's getting harder by the day. Society has become a lot more panopticon-like relative to 10, 20 years ago.
Because civilized society has agreed that the burden of providing some essential needs for those who cannot afford them should be shared by everybody.
Not everyone has agreed. I don't. Can I opt out? If a majority of the people "agree" that we are going to steal your money, would it make it morally right just because a majority agreed? No, it wouldn't. You can try dress up the crude act of stealing with terms like "civilized" but you're just trying to gild a turd.
(1) Isn't it a bit of a strawman to suggest that the only two possibilities, are either an impossible 100% guarantee of complete affordability, or a complete population crash due to not meeting the 100% guarantee? Don't you think that in real life, while there are no absolutes, people can and do (and reasonably so) deal with approximately probabilities, and that there is a huge range of grey in these probabilities? E.g. I can estimate, statistically, that there is an above 80% chance I will be able to support and raise my child until they are an adult, and that a cost/benefit risk/weight analysis suggests it is reasonable to have kids?
(2) Don't you think that when people say "If you can't afford kids, don't have them", that, as reasonable humans operating with ordinary reasonable human assumptions, that they are not talking in absolutes, but with respect to "reasonable probabilities", rather than interpreting it literally? NOBODY really means or interprets statements like this 100% literally, and that is normal, since we aren't robots, we're humans, and it doesn't cause a miscommunication - pretending it does is false.
(3) People can and DO listen to the "If you can't afford them, don't have them" ... this philosophy is engrained into certain sub-cultures of modern society, precisely BECAUSE people keep repeating it. I learned this philosophy from young as a child because I heard many adults say it. And now I practice it. I have one kid, and I calculate what I can afford. So your argument (A) is also false. Sure, not EVERYONE on the ENTIRE PLANET is going to listen. But should we stop teaching a philosophy just because we can't get it through to every last human on the planet?
(4) With so many blatant logical fallacies, how did you get modded up?
Until greed comes along. What gay partners want is not recognition, they are after the pensions and tax benefits that were created for families.
Are you saying that straight couples also then only marry out of greed? I.e. to get those benefits? Or would they marry even if there were no benefits? Your argument is not logical. If gay couples want to marry "out of greed", then it follows that straight couples must also be marrying "out of greed", and I presume your intention wasn't to criticize straight couples. If straight couples are not marrying out of greed, then logically, it means they would get married even if there were not financial benefits (which I think is reasonable to assume). However, if it's reasonable to assume that straight couples would get married even without benfits, then why would it not be reasonable to assume that gay couples would also get married even if there were no financial benefits? Are you claiming that gay couples somehow uniquely don't actually really love each other, they're all just looking for money? It doesn't make sense.
Finally, your argument is also illogical in that the LAST thing that really makes financial sense, is marriage! The modern institution of marriage (and accompanying divorce laws etc.) has financially ruined millions of people. If you want to be fiscally smart, the absolute last thing you will want to do, is marry. Marriage is extremely financially risky.
Not only that, but apparently this is so critical that we need to borrow money to pay for it.
Legislating morality = cheap votes from the proletariat.
How is HFT a form of theft? And if HFT gives better returns the 'common trader' can benefit by just investing their money at firms that do HFT.
Goldman are indeed a bunch of crooks, but not through HFT ... look at tax-funded stimulus, bailouts, Fed arrangements etc. - THAT is theft.
Millisecond-arbitrage is the least of Goldman's 'evils'. Robbing taxpayers via "stimulus", dodgy bail-outs, and crony corruption at high political levels seem far worse ... and that's where they get the cash for the bonuses.
Just using super-computers for millisecond arbitrage doesn't seem too egregious ---- ANYONE can benefit from that, if it's profitable, by just investing their money with Goldman. And if you invest money with an investment firm, wouldn't you want them to manage the money in a way that gives you better returns? Or would you say "I would like lower returns thanks".
But they didn't get so rich from these trading systems, in fact if you recall they LOST a lot of money from their trading arms. That's why they needed the bailouts!
If an employee took Google's search engine and data center management code and used it for personal gain, I would call it "copyright infringement with damages", NOT "stealing", because facts don't actually change just because you get emotional about something. If the personal gain was selling the code to the Chinese government, then there may be other additional crimes, but none of them would be "stealing" either. Google would lose, but the loss wouldn't be due to "theft", the loss would be due to "damages". Try to keep a clear head.
Look, I grew up entirely in the days 'before the Internet', and I promise you that as a child, we had plenty of ways to get access to porn. Getting some of those magazines down from the high shelves? Trivial! Where there's a will there's a way. I don't ever remember any 'nanny-squad' ever busting us for any kind of porn either.
And that was before the Internet. It is pure la-la-land denial if anyone thinks they can somehow even remotely prevent their children from seeing plenty of porn in their childhood.
Amazingly, none of us that I know who grew up looking at porn seems to have been screwed up or harmed by it, they all seem like well-adjusted adults in healthy relationships etc.
As long as those 'general blocking measures' remain in private institutions like corporations, and not government censorship, I don't see that that's a problem .. employees shouldn't really be using company computers and bandwidth to browse porn anyway, and .xxx would be easier to block.
well if it regulated that 'pornographic' sites must be on .xxx and no where else
"If"? Is someone proposing that? If so, then sure, I would heavily disagree with that, that would be a major problem, but I don't see the leap from the creation of .xxx to such an assumption.
A lot of the spending money making America "broke" is on the military, meaning that money is being spent anyway, just that it would otherwise be spent on either peaceful exercises and training, or exiting operations like Afghanistan or Iraq. Therefore it's possible to do something about Qadaffi with zero or nearly zero net additional expenditure. You just fly over and bomb targets in Libya instead of training targets and flights. And the US already has battleships and plenty other troops etc. nearby. While I agree something drastic needs to be done about the consistent budget deficits and alarming national debt, that isn't really an argument here.
The whole thing is a litany of reasoning errors. Like the claim that you wouldn't "need much of a police force". Uhm, no, you'd need a dedicated police force just to enforce no-privacy, because people are going to try get around it all the time - to commit crimes, to try cheat on their spouses, to falsify their own records etc., to migrate there illegally. Especially desperate people who can't get a job because of their bad record are literally pushed into a corner - no money = desperation. And you'd need to build and monitor a huge wall around the city, monitoring every possible way of getting into and out of the city. No, no costs there. You'd need a whole dedicated justice system for 'crimes of committing privacy'.
Personally I just want to be left the hell alone, and it's my right to do so. I would move as far away from this city as possible. Even if costs more to live in my cabin in mountains, or whatever.
You didn't read the article, did you? I quote: "I think that if one could save 30% on basic living expenses, and live in a relatively crime-free area, plenty of volunteers would come forward." .. so yes, he does indeed jump from 30% off insurance premiums
And this isn't a "weird thing to criticize": It's the entire foundation of the thought experiment: I quote again, "This is just an economic thought experiment."
Moreover, what you dismiss as 'weird things to criticize', are actually a pattern of logical fallacies that destroy his argument. This isn't the only reasoning error in his thought experiment. For example:
At tax time, you'd be done before you started. All of your financial activities would be tracked in real time, so your taxes would always be up to date.
Whaaa!? Spoken like someone who has never started their own business. That is absurd on the face of it. If I buy just about any random thing - say, a domain name on my credit card - there is no way to automatically know if that was a personal expense or a business expense.
Oh, OK, I honestly thought you were serious.
Gee, it's exactly as I said:
http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/77943.html
"The utility said a hydrogen explosion at the nearby No. 3 reactor that occurred Monday morning may have caused a glitch in the cooling system of the No. 2 reactor."
These explosions are firstly such massive structural shocks that the blast could be felt 30 miles away, secondly shoot debris at high speed in all directions, and third, massive chunks of tonnes of concrete rain down randomly on the rest of the plant. All these things can and will cause damage to other components, in unpredictable fashions, e.g.pipe breakages.
Watch the video of the second blast, you can even visibly see huge chunks of concrete raining down back onto the plant (from tens of miles away) - incidentally, on the side of reactor 2.
This is common sense.
Nuclear doesn't pollute the biosphere. (Except for the occasional bad accident, but the risks of really bad accidents are actually pretty low, and have been decreasing as plant designs improve. We've had a world full of nuclear power for decades now and apart from one spot on the earth where nobody can live for a while, and a small but non-negligible chance of a second such spot appearing in Japan soon, we seem to be doing OK; the apocalyptic scenarios the nuclear naysayers predicted for decades, haven't come to pass. Even if Fukushima goes worst-case, only a tiny handful of people might die.)
They've got limited staff who have been operating in crisis mode for days of likely working round the clock, are becoming ill from radiation poisoning, expect they may die, many have suffered personal losses recently, and half the country is in turmoil with tens of thousands missing or dead ... I would think it's quite possible that some of them are not at their sharpest right now and may make mistakes. The human element is a real factor in plant operation, especially under extreme situations.
Taco's job is to 'stimulate lively online discussion', as such accepted submissions are generally those that 'border on inflammatory, but without being total troll'. I wouldn't call it a 'bias' so much as the job description of running an online discussion forum.
You win "most cheery-eyed optimistic post on Internet" award.
Know what I find even more irritating than the rabid "zomg nuclear, hysteria!!" anti-nuke crowd? The rabid "zomg it's totally safe" crowd, who will absurdly adamantly crow that it's all perfectly normal and safe and nothing to worry about when nuclear power stations frikkin explode in a series of huge blasts that can be seen, heard and felt 30 miles away, while fuel rods partly melt down..
Sometimes, taking the polar opposite of a stupid (e.g. anti-nuke) position, is intelligent. But sometimes, taking the polar opposite of a stupid position, is just being stupid in the opposite direction. This is one of those times.
I am pro-nuke. But I am realistically so, not rabid-cultist deny-there-are-any-risks-whatsoever pro-nuke. Hysterically claiming it's highly dangerous is no worse than hysterically crowing that it is risk-free and safe. No wonder the anti-nukers are jittery. Let's be honest, nuclear power is a somewhat risky business. And even the best of engineering is sometimes no match for operator error.
And sometimes even the most well-intentioned, well-trained experienced operators can make mistakes, for example if - like at Fukushima - they've been working in crisis mode for days on end, are ill from radiation poisoning, no doubt exhausted ... know what caused the latest exposure of fuel? Human error.
Nuclear plants are run by humans. Nuclear does carry many risks, it is far from the simplest and most risk-free of human endeavours. Should we become hysterical about them? NO. But should we hysterically deny it carries risks? NO. What we should do is keep those risks in fact-based perspective. So what is the absolutely worst case scenario at Fukushima? Seemingly, that maybe a relatively tiny number of people die or get sick (especially compared to e.g. the number that die or get sick from coal power production), and that a portion of Japan say 30 miles radius in Japan becomes unlivable for a thousand years. Would that be the end of the world? No, not at all. Life will go on just fine for everyone. Basically the whole town will survive and be healthy. But the risk does exist of it happening. I remain pro-nuke, but hysterically exaggerating the safety of, or playing down the risks involved in nuclear power production does NOT help the pro-nuke case. In fact it does the opposite, because the anti-nuke people see it and picture folks like that - living in denial that there are risks - running these plants.
So you are saying it was stupid and pointless evacuating hundreds of thousands of people? "Hey townsfolk, don't worry, come back, the evacuation was a mistake, there is no danger, ha ha"