And if all this had happened in the US and not some faraway country where it's all abstract? Still not news? Still all bullshit? You don't have to be "anti-nuke" to admit that yes, this is a serious crisis. I am heavily pro-nuke, but because it's not a religion or a cult to me, I don't close my eyes and blindly pretend this isn't actually, yes, a Pretty Bad Situation. I can admit that. Is it the end of the world, no, of course not, but sticking your fingers in your ears and going "la la la it's just a normal day" just makes the pro-nuke people look like irrational idiots to the anti-nuke crowd, and thus harms our case. You know what makes the anti-nuke crowd scared more than anything? The way rabid pro-nukers like you seem to pretend that nothing can go wrong ever, and they imagine people like you running the plants, and that scares them, because people who pretend that nothing can go wrong ever are precisely one of the major contributing factors to man-made disasters. Stick to the truth and science and only the truth and science. This should be framed in context, and framed in terms of lessons to be learned.
You're kidding right? Would you be saying the same thing if a nuclear plant in the US had two major containment unit explosions, release of radiation into the environment, and the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people in a 15-mile radius from a plant? It seems quite reasonable to me that it should be at least a major news story even without the accompanying earthquake, tsunami and other nuclear plant emergencies. "Why is this even news" - puh-lease... the only thing worse than the mainstream media overreaction is arrogant people who try prove their intellectual superiority to everyone by making the absurd-on-the-face-of-it claim that this incident should not even be in the news.
Yes, they're clearly totally in control here - all this falls within the design parameters, I'm sure. That's why since the latest explosion, the situation is getting worse with some of the other reactors now too, and Japan is even asking for international emergency assistance, as they are unable to keep the coolant running over the fuel:
All by design, all within the engineering parameters. Sure.
Don't be absurd. An explosion of this magnitude, and all bets are off - design can help you MINIMIZE relative probability of worsening the catastrophe, but I know what engineered fault tolerance looks like, and this isn't it. We're well into a scenario in which luck now plays a part.
Not to be funny, but after an explosion like the one at reactor 1, it's really just luck that the cooling systems for the reactors weren't rendered totally inoperable (or for that matter that worse damage wasn't done to the reactor primary containment), leading to worse catastrophe... a blast like that could just as easily have caused worse damage. Sure their operators might be performing "very well", but there has also been some luck involved here.
"What progress?" Perspective-flash for you, the world only knew about Chernobyl at all, when a giant radioactive cloud was spotted drifting over hundreds of miles of Northern Europe. That was less than 25 years ago, within my living memory. Now in every corner of the world we can sit and watch almost up-to-the-minute coverage from our armchairs via Google News / Google Realtime. I'd say we have come a LONG way in getting up-to-date information out. Sure it could be better, but I have been following this quite closely and I have found that provided you stick to relatively reliable sources and ignore the sensationalism, the information coming out is "reasonable". Certainly, it could be better, and I think the Japanese officials have been overly frugal with the facts, and downplaying the severity of what was happening (e.g. saying a the 'roof of a building collapsed', by the time we had all already seen the video of the containment unit blowing sky-high)... or claiming they had it all under control when clearly they hadn't and don't, things are still very touch and go. On the other hand, people are panicking enough.
Part of the problem though is that most journalists don't have the first clue about nuclear power.
Of course, it was predictable that the probably already-readied template press releases from the anti-nuclear greenies would come hard and fast the moment the world learned of the problems... I'm sure they all came in their pants and were salivating when they heard the news, this is their big opportunity to push their agenda.
Actually that's part of the problem - there aren't yet "far better alternatives". Your lack of even naming one of these "far better alternatives" is telling. Solar is slowly becoming cheaper but is still triple the cost of coal or nuclear and is still decades away from being remotely as cost-efficient, has problems if you have too many cloudy days, and has nasty byproducts in manufacturing. Hydro and wind have relatively limited application. Coal is cheap but filthy. It is not clear to me what "far better alternatives" you are referring to. Want to back that up with a reference?
"Democracy" is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner. "Democracy" isn't inherently good because it implies 'mob rule' - the 'will of the people' may be to violate the liberties or raid the private property of some members of society, for example, or whatever. It isn't automatically morally correct, in fact the 'will of the people' is often specifically morally incorrect. The purpose (i.e. intent) of Constitutionalism is to prevent this happening; the people may elect leaders but the leaders may not violate the Constitution. In theory this is what the US was supposed to be but it didn't turn out that way.
Some people invent without patents, but it's clear that the vast majority of invention is done by people because they can profit from it.. to claim otherwise is simply well beyond absurd.
It's even worse than that, given that half the software patent trolls aren't even 'inventions', if you just write and sell software, a patent troll can come along, look at your existing software, patent some or other procedure within the software, and sue you. And the possible number of patentable workflows within the average software application (according to the patent office's standards) is huge, it's not even feasible to patent them all. This is also great for the big companies as they have the resources to file, so all they need to do is look at what little innovative companies are doing, and patent it. This isn't "reform", this is clearly funded by the big corps and patent trolls. They've literally removed even the semblence of pretending to care about justice in the patent system.. it's bizarre.
?? They're not doing it to 'prove Jobs right', they're just doing what they think makes financial sense. What do they gain from 'standing their ground' (what does that mean - to financially keep supporting a technology of yesterday?), if it means they miss the boat on the market for authoring tools for HTML5, which IS going to be the biggest Web platform of the next decade? This isn't WWE or something, it's just business. Adobe can't stop Flash from dying, and it has little to do with Jobs, since Jobs didn't create HTML5, in fact the main development spearheading of that effort comes from Google and Chrome etc., with browsers like Firefox and even IE9 implementing support too.
MS could do all that because they were so dominant. Apple are not dominant, on the contrary, they have thriving competition, which will keep their behavior in check. I wouldn't lose much sleep over it.
The difference is that today, Apple, Google, Microsoft etc. all have decent, healthy competition between one another and from outsiders. That keeps any of them from behaving overly "evil". Certainly today's computer industry is nothing like the bad old days of MS dominance and stagnation back in the 90s.
Feel the flamebait! I got sucked in too. I know they post these inflammatory comments to generate lively discussion but... can't... help... self... ungh.
Really? Then we have a major problem, because I bet if you ask students why they are there, 99.9% of them will say it's to help them get a job, and for no other reason (I mean, apart from the obvious, like partying and girls). If universities aren't about job training, then why do people go at all? A "job" is precisely the one thing the average young adult cast into the world wants and needs.
but the vast majority of CS degrees are fundamental math and theory. They don't train people to be IT workers, they train them to be programmers and theoreticians.
I think the real problem is that the vast majority of CS degrees are fundamental drinking, partying, girls, copying, cramming, girls, "scraping through", girls, drinking, "learning as little as you can get away with to pass", then "feeling entitled to getting a well-paid job where the employer trains you on all the things you were supposed to learn while getting your degree".
If you're somewhat self-motivated and hard-working and have something of a passion for the craft, so to speak, you'll graduate "ready to go", and it probably won't even matter much if you were "trained" to "be" a programmer or theoretician or whatever. But that only describes a very small percentage of people. When I was studying, I spent most my free time programming, just because I loved it so much.
Can you even instill the appropriate values or passion or interest in someone by the time they hit college age? Perhaps in a few cases, but probably not in most. That's why good IT skills, programming or otherwise, are still hard to come by.
The HR departments of companies then have to sift through the 99% of junk CV's to find the odd needle in a haystack of quality.
Frankly I'm not sure we should be sending so many kids to college to train in fields they aren't that useful in. Look how much plumbers make, why not let some of these kids become things like plumbers instead and help bring the costs of those services down, there's no shame in that. The US needs to get back to more of a 'making stuff' economy.
You know the more free advertising you do for Tolkien's work like that, the more money the estate makes, which might not be quite the spiteful effect you had in mind there. This is reverse-psychology-streisand-effect, or something like that.
Sigh. I think you're confusing "bond vigilante" with "bubble". It's the opposite. Investors are already currently over tied up in bonds, that's the problem. And the bursting of that one will be because of fundamentals, not because a bubble is popping - namely, bond markets go bust when it becomes clear that the government is borrowing and spending more money than its people would even be capable of paying back if they all worked their nuts off.
It has nothing to do with "speculators", because the assets aren't speculatively inflated in the first place. It's more akin to a bear market. Nobody is "going after" the US dollar, the government's actions and fundamentals are weakening it. No investor truly "wants" to see the US dollar collapse, even if they're shorting it, because the mess that would cause would result in everyone losing money... all investors are trying to do is not lose money on this one, which is quite rational and normal.
Here's an anology. Say you lend your deadbeat ex-drug addict brother money at 1% interest, because he convinces you he has cleaned up his act and is getting a job. After a while you realize he is just going to sit on your couch and play video games and never really get a job and is just leeching off you, and isn't going to pay you back. So you stop lending him more money. You're still out what you originally lent him - you haven't gained anything. You tell all your other family members about it, and so he then has a much harder time borrowing money from other family members. He might manage to convince your sister in the short-term to lend him more money, but because she has heard your story, she asks for 5% interest instead of 1%. If the brother manages to get his act together, gets a job, he might be able to pay some of the money back. But at a point it could become impossible for him to borrow money. So he gets desperate, and starts counterfeiting money.
Right now the US is still mostly regarded as being good for their debt, but lenders are starting to wonder, and question if the US is going to get off the couch.
One crucial difference is that if Walmart got the formulas wrong and were run badly, they would die, and another company would step in that was better run. Government, on the other, could run a centrally planned economy poorly or inefficiently for literally decades with no reprisals to them whatsoever, just the people suffer. No "competing government" could step in. There is no incentive to do it well.
Because for capitalism to function, supply must never meet demand
The housing bubble wasn't caused by capitalism, it was caused by artificially low interest rates dictated artificially by the government, combined with massive amounts of easy credit from the government (newly printed money loaned into existence), combined with artificially low lending standards pushed by, once more, the government. None of these things remotely resemble "capitalism". This resulted in society ending up with an incorrect perception of what the true demand for houses was by artificially inflating demand, leading to society shifting far too much of its production resources towards building too many houses during the faux "boom" years.
FB is busy raising capital, which means its valuation is based on what its investors expect it to be worth once it has spent the raised capital on whatever it is it is raising capital for. Presumably that includes increasing the number of users. If they get to a billion users soon, which seems plausible, you're already down to $50 per user, for example. Also taken into account is whatever else it is planning that we don't know about, that its major investors are privy to. When you're raising capital, your valuation is based on more than just a multiple of your current pre-capital profit because capital allows you to expand. You get capital because you earn confidence in the capital markets, i.e. someone at Goldman thinks Zuckerberg's the next Page/Brin.
Nevertheless, $50 billion is a large multiple of even Google's current profits. It does seem a little high to me.
Personally I think there is a bubble, or at the very least, stock inflation. See, Goldman, like many other banks at the moment, is one of the major beneficiaries of "stimulus" and gets huge tonnes of Bernanke's newly printed money from the Fed handed to them. That puts them in the position of having lots of easy tax-funded "funny money" to throw around looking for something to invest in, with such big amounts that they distort the market valuations of what they go after. Moreover history tells us that while any profits will remain private, losses will be socialized. This is a moral hazard that leads to excess risk-taking. Many banks are sitting on huge stockpiles of such 'stimulus'. This appears to be fueling stock market inflation. Some of what we see as a 'stock market recovery' is just stock price inflation. People put their money in stocks as it helps hedge against coming inflation. In effect it means banks and markets and investors are expecting high inflation from the money-printing, i.e. dollar devaluation, and the valuation at $50bn is also thus effectively partly based on the future dollar value, which is worth less.
"Hackers halfway across the world might know your password, but they don't know who your friends are"
Worse, hackers halfway across the world might not know who my friends are, but people close to me, like my ex-girlfriend and wife and close friends, sure do. Many people would probably be more worried about people close to them logging into their accounts, than 'hackers' - plus it's the people close to you who are most likely to try log in to your accounts. I'm not usually "Mr. Knee-jerk Contrarian" but this time I think this is a very stupid idea.
Slashdot Mirror
And if all this had happened in the US and not some faraway country where it's all abstract? Still not news? Still all bullshit? You don't have to be "anti-nuke" to admit that yes, this is a serious crisis. I am heavily pro-nuke, but because it's not a religion or a cult to me, I don't close my eyes and blindly pretend this isn't actually, yes, a Pretty Bad Situation. I can admit that. Is it the end of the world, no, of course not, but sticking your fingers in your ears and going "la la la it's just a normal day" just makes the pro-nuke people look like irrational idiots to the anti-nuke crowd, and thus harms our case. You know what makes the anti-nuke crowd scared more than anything? The way rabid pro-nukers like you seem to pretend that nothing can go wrong ever, and they imagine people like you running the plants, and that scares them, because people who pretend that nothing can go wrong ever are precisely one of the major contributing factors to man-made disasters. Stick to the truth and science and only the truth and science. This should be framed in context, and framed in terms of lessons to be learned.
You're kidding right? Would you be saying the same thing if a nuclear plant in the US had two major containment unit explosions, release of radiation into the environment, and the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people in a 15-mile radius from a plant? It seems quite reasonable to me that it should be at least a major news story even without the accompanying earthquake, tsunami and other nuclear plant emergencies. "Why is this even news" - puh-lease ... the only thing worse than the mainstream media overreaction is arrogant people who try prove their intellectual superiority to everyone by making the absurd-on-the-face-of-it claim that this incident should not even be in the news.
Yes, they're clearly totally in control here - all this falls within the design parameters, I'm sure. That's why since the latest explosion, the situation is getting worse with some of the other reactors now too, and Japan is even asking for international emergency assistance, as they are unable to keep the coolant running over the fuel:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cdc71436-4e59-11e0-98eb-00144feab49a.html#axzz1GbQ6aaki
All by design, all within the engineering parameters. Sure.
Don't be absurd. An explosion of this magnitude, and all bets are off - design can help you MINIMIZE relative probability of worsening the catastrophe, but I know what engineered fault tolerance looks like, and this isn't it. We're well into a scenario in which luck now plays a part.
Not to be funny, but after an explosion like the one at reactor 1, it's really just luck that the cooling systems for the reactors weren't rendered totally inoperable (or for that matter that worse damage wasn't done to the reactor primary containment), leading to worse catastrophe ... a blast like that could just as easily have caused worse damage. Sure their operators might be performing "very well", but there has also been some luck involved here.
Wow, that would be insightful if you weren't outright lying ... even the link you posted actually shows otherwise.
"I'm not sure what the potential upsides are."
Nuclear power is very clean. And inexpensive.
"What progress?" Perspective-flash for you, the world only knew about Chernobyl at all, when a giant radioactive cloud was spotted drifting over hundreds of miles of Northern Europe. That was less than 25 years ago, within my living memory. Now in every corner of the world we can sit and watch almost up-to-the-minute coverage from our armchairs via Google News / Google Realtime. I'd say we have come a LONG way in getting up-to-date information out. Sure it could be better, but I have been following this quite closely and I have found that provided you stick to relatively reliable sources and ignore the sensationalism, the information coming out is "reasonable". Certainly, it could be better, and I think the Japanese officials have been overly frugal with the facts, and downplaying the severity of what was happening (e.g. saying a the 'roof of a building collapsed', by the time we had all already seen the video of the containment unit blowing sky-high) ... or claiming they had it all under control when clearly they hadn't and don't, things are still very touch and go. On the other hand, people are panicking enough.
Part of the problem though is that most journalists don't have the first clue about nuclear power.
Of course, it was predictable that the probably already-readied template press releases from the anti-nuclear greenies would come hard and fast the moment the world learned of the problems ... I'm sure they all came in their pants and were salivating when they heard the news, this is their big opportunity to push their agenda.
Nuclear Energy is dated, and its time is past.
There are far better alternatives
Actually that's part of the problem - there aren't yet "far better alternatives". Your lack of even naming one of these "far better alternatives" is telling. Solar is slowly becoming cheaper but is still triple the cost of coal or nuclear and is still decades away from being remotely as cost-efficient, has problems if you have too many cloudy days, and has nasty byproducts in manufacturing. Hydro and wind have relatively limited application. Coal is cheap but filthy. It is not clear to me what "far better alternatives" you are referring to. Want to back that up with a reference?
"Democracy" is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner. "Democracy" isn't inherently good because it implies 'mob rule' - the 'will of the people' may be to violate the liberties or raid the private property of some members of society, for example, or whatever. It isn't automatically morally correct, in fact the 'will of the people' is often specifically morally incorrect. The purpose (i.e. intent) of Constitutionalism is to prevent this happening; the people may elect leaders but the leaders may not violate the Constitution. In theory this is what the US was supposed to be but it didn't turn out that way.
Some people invent without patents, but it's clear that the vast majority of invention is done by people because they can profit from it .. to claim otherwise is simply well beyond absurd.
It was not made to protect anyone or let anyone profit from anything.
Um, that's exactly why it was created. If it was to 'move knowledge into society' then the best system would be no system.
You're saying small businesses, who don't have the money to file, don't deserve the same protections on their inventions that big businesses do?
It's even worse than that, given that half the software patent trolls aren't even 'inventions', if you just write and sell software, a patent troll can come along, look at your existing software, patent some or other procedure within the software, and sue you. And the possible number of patentable workflows within the average software application (according to the patent office's standards) is huge, it's not even feasible to patent them all. This is also great for the big companies as they have the resources to file, so all they need to do is look at what little innovative companies are doing, and patent it. This isn't "reform", this is clearly funded by the big corps and patent trolls. They've literally removed even the semblence of pretending to care about justice in the patent system .. it's bizarre.
?? They're not doing it to 'prove Jobs right', they're just doing what they think makes financial sense. What do they gain from 'standing their ground' (what does that mean - to financially keep supporting a technology of yesterday?), if it means they miss the boat on the market for authoring tools for HTML5, which IS going to be the biggest Web platform of the next decade? This isn't WWE or something, it's just business. Adobe can't stop Flash from dying, and it has little to do with Jobs, since Jobs didn't create HTML5, in fact the main development spearheading of that effort comes from Google and Chrome etc., with browsers like Firefox and even IE9 implementing support too.
?? Did you reply to the wrong post? Your reply is a total non-sequitur.
MS could do all that because they were so dominant. Apple are not dominant, on the contrary, they have thriving competition, which will keep their behavior in check. I wouldn't lose much sleep over it.
The difference is that today, Apple, Google, Microsoft etc. all have decent, healthy competition between one another and from outsiders. That keeps any of them from behaving overly "evil". Certainly today's computer industry is nothing like the bad old days of MS dominance and stagnation back in the 90s.
Feel the flamebait! I got sucked in too. I know they post these inflammatory comments to generate lively discussion but ... can't ... help ... self ... ungh.
University is not about job training
Really? Then we have a major problem, because I bet if you ask students why they are there, 99.9% of them will say it's to help them get a job, and for no other reason (I mean, apart from the obvious, like partying and girls). If universities aren't about job training, then why do people go at all? A "job" is precisely the one thing the average young adult cast into the world wants and needs.
I sincerely hope that was tongue-in-cheek.
but the vast majority of CS degrees are fundamental math and theory. They don't train people to be IT workers, they train them to be programmers and theoreticians.
I think the real problem is that the vast majority of CS degrees are fundamental drinking, partying, girls, copying, cramming, girls, "scraping through", girls, drinking, "learning as little as you can get away with to pass", then "feeling entitled to getting a well-paid job where the employer trains you on all the things you were supposed to learn while getting your degree".
If you're somewhat self-motivated and hard-working and have something of a passion for the craft, so to speak, you'll graduate "ready to go", and it probably won't even matter much if you were "trained" to "be" a programmer or theoretician or whatever. But that only describes a very small percentage of people. When I was studying, I spent most my free time programming, just because I loved it so much.
Can you even instill the appropriate values or passion or interest in someone by the time they hit college age? Perhaps in a few cases, but probably not in most. That's why good IT skills, programming or otherwise, are still hard to come by.
The HR departments of companies then have to sift through the 99% of junk CV's to find the odd needle in a haystack of quality.
Frankly I'm not sure we should be sending so many kids to college to train in fields they aren't that useful in. Look how much plumbers make, why not let some of these kids become things like plumbers instead and help bring the costs of those services down, there's no shame in that. The US needs to get back to more of a 'making stuff' economy.
You know the more free advertising you do for Tolkien's work like that, the more money the estate makes, which might not be quite the spiteful effect you had in mind there. This is reverse-psychology-streisand-effect, or something like that.
Sigh. I think you're confusing "bond vigilante" with "bubble". It's the opposite. Investors are already currently over tied up in bonds, that's the problem. And the bursting of that one will be because of fundamentals, not because a bubble is popping - namely, bond markets go bust when it becomes clear that the government is borrowing and spending more money than its people would even be capable of paying back if they all worked their nuts off.
It has nothing to do with "speculators", because the assets aren't speculatively inflated in the first place. It's more akin to a bear market. Nobody is "going after" the US dollar, the government's actions and fundamentals are weakening it. No investor truly "wants" to see the US dollar collapse, even if they're shorting it, because the mess that would cause would result in everyone losing money ... all investors are trying to do is not lose money on this one, which is quite rational and normal.
Here's an anology. Say you lend your deadbeat ex-drug addict brother money at 1% interest, because he convinces you he has cleaned up his act and is getting a job. After a while you realize he is just going to sit on your couch and play video games and never really get a job and is just leeching off you, and isn't going to pay you back. So you stop lending him more money. You're still out what you originally lent him - you haven't gained anything. You tell all your other family members about it, and so he then has a much harder time borrowing money from other family members. He might manage to convince your sister in the short-term to lend him more money, but because she has heard your story, she asks for 5% interest instead of 1%. If the brother manages to get his act together, gets a job, he might be able to pay some of the money back. But at a point it could become impossible for him to borrow money. So he gets desperate, and starts counterfeiting money.
Right now the US is still mostly regarded as being good for their debt, but lenders are starting to wonder, and question if the US is going to get off the couch.
There is no speculation involved in this.
One crucial difference is that if Walmart got the formulas wrong and were run badly, they would die, and another company would step in that was better run. Government, on the other, could run a centrally planned economy poorly or inefficiently for literally decades with no reprisals to them whatsoever, just the people suffer. No "competing government" could step in. There is no incentive to do it well.
Because for capitalism to function, supply must never meet demand
The housing bubble wasn't caused by capitalism, it was caused by artificially low interest rates dictated artificially by the government, combined with massive amounts of easy credit from the government (newly printed money loaned into existence), combined with artificially low lending standards pushed by, once more, the government. None of these things remotely resemble "capitalism". This resulted in society ending up with an incorrect perception of what the true demand for houses was by artificially inflating demand, leading to society shifting far too much of its production resources towards building too many houses during the faux "boom" years.
FB is busy raising capital, which means its valuation is based on what its investors expect it to be worth once it has spent the raised capital on whatever it is it is raising capital for. Presumably that includes increasing the number of users. If they get to a billion users soon, which seems plausible, you're already down to $50 per user, for example. Also taken into account is whatever else it is planning that we don't know about, that its major investors are privy to. When you're raising capital, your valuation is based on more than just a multiple of your current pre-capital profit because capital allows you to expand. You get capital because you earn confidence in the capital markets, i.e. someone at Goldman thinks Zuckerberg's the next Page/Brin.
Nevertheless, $50 billion is a large multiple of even Google's current profits. It does seem a little high to me.
Personally I think there is a bubble, or at the very least, stock inflation. See, Goldman, like many other banks at the moment, is one of the major beneficiaries of "stimulus" and gets huge tonnes of Bernanke's newly printed money from the Fed handed to them. That puts them in the position of having lots of easy tax-funded "funny money" to throw around looking for something to invest in, with such big amounts that they distort the market valuations of what they go after. Moreover history tells us that while any profits will remain private, losses will be socialized. This is a moral hazard that leads to excess risk-taking. Many banks are sitting on huge stockpiles of such 'stimulus'. This appears to be fueling stock market inflation. Some of what we see as a 'stock market recovery' is just stock price inflation. People put their money in stocks as it helps hedge against coming inflation. In effect it means banks and markets and investors are expecting high inflation from the money-printing, i.e. dollar devaluation, and the valuation at $50bn is also thus effectively partly based on the future dollar value, which is worth less.
"Hackers halfway across the world might know your password, but they don't know who your friends are"
Worse, hackers halfway across the world might not know who my friends are, but people close to me, like my ex-girlfriend and wife and close friends, sure do. Many people would probably be more worried about people close to them logging into their accounts, than 'hackers' - plus it's the people close to you who are most likely to try log in to your accounts. I'm not usually "Mr. Knee-jerk Contrarian" but this time I think this is a very stupid idea.