If you are not talking about a gold standard, what system are you proposing?
I have not proposing anything in this discussion at all, I am explaining why your original remark about mythical "people with cash" being the only ones hurt by inflation is wrong.
I know the bank isn't invested in cash, but the depositor certainly is.
Depositor is invested in a bank, not cash. "Investment in cash" would be storing cash in a vault (or mattress) in hope that its value will rise. That only works when you have a prolonged, consistent deflation -- what means, nowhere in reality. At best one can "invest" in a currency that devalues slower than whatever currency he uses for transactions, this happens when local currency experiences runaway inflation far beyond growth of production.
Similarly, you mention the bank being required to hold reserves - ultimately these are just a cash balance with the Federal Reserve. That is about as much a "cash investment" as you can possibly have.
Reserve is the opposite of investment -- it's un-invested money that must be present to cover current and expected transactions and offset risk. Banks would love nothing more than to operate with as little reserves as possible, because reserves lose value over time. The problem is, without sufficient reserves they expose themselves and their clients to excessive risk -- short term if they can't cover current transactions, long-term if they can't offset occasional defaulted loans.
The greatest problem of recent bailout is that financial institutions tapped into public money after their reserves could not cover spectacularly bad investments. That meant, money were produced at a rate as if the system is working, however investments failed to produce any value -- economy did not grow, and excess of injected money merely diluted existing ones. Banks tout the fact that they "paid back" the bailout loans, however this is a mere distraction from the real issue -- all such loans would be "paid back" due to ever-increasing money supply, this time they just produced no growth of economy that increasing money supply relies on. This is one of many mechanisms that can produce inflation spikes, however damage to the economy comes not from inflation but from those mechanisms themselves. The fact that high rates of inflation can do direct damage to the living conditions of large groups of people, is just the cherry on top.
I'm not "boo-hooing". I'm pointing out that the only people hurt by constant, predictable inflation are those with cash investments - and you rightly point out that they are compensated by interest. I'm the one arguing that constant, predictable inflation is not a big problem.
For those people -- not a problem at all, unless banks are greedy enough to keep interest below inflation. What sometimes is the case, so those deposits are merely suffer less from inflation. Either is better than nothing at all.
They also lack any exposure, since they have nothing in the bank. If they do have money in the bank, it probably bears little or no interest (like in a checking account).
Their life is their "exposure". They are under constant risk of living expenses outgrowing their income -- and their spending is nearly absolutely inflexible. Where it is flexible, it's even worse -- trying to save on quality of food, for example, increases risk of diseases that will permanently damage their ability to work, even without taking direct medical expenses into account.
This is an extremely high risk, higher than for any other category in society. In fact, it is higher than the risk of most criminal activities, what explains why it's a perfectly rational choice for working poor to turn to crime -- their risk goes down that way.
I'm sure they are. But if you think that the working poor don't notice, I don't think you are listening very hard. Half of
Solution: don't let "average coders" write software. If standards were that low in medicine, people would drop dead right and left thanks to "average doctors" not being able to tell flu from the hole in the ground. Fortunately, "average doctors" like those are simply not allowed to practice, and only competent ones are actually treat sick people.
Software development has exactly the same problem -- decades ago all software had lax requirements, so programmers with abilities of an average shaman from a primitive tribe could be allowed to work on any project. Now this is not the case because software is more important, and people realize that requirements have to be strict. Just like with doctors, it will work just fine, as long as idiots, charlatans, retards and people with no capabilities to be a good programmer, will be prevented from doing anything that others depend on.
What on earth are you talking about? Getting a pay cut is too expensive to implement? The poor took pay cuts all the time prior to the abolition of the gold standard. Hell, they are getting pay cuts now, even with constant rates of planned inflation.
Both pay cut and pay raise requires administrative expenses. Employers would have trouble constantly adjusting low-paid employees' salary to keep up with inflation even if they wanted to, and on top of this, there is no incentive because employees do not realize how the purchasing power of their salaries is dwindling.
Also shut up about gold standard. It has absolutely nothing to do with this.
??? A bank account is a cash investment. A loan is a cash investment. Taking your money and putting it in a safe is a cash investment. Bank accounts, loans, and a safe full of money all lose value with inflation.
Cash is not an investment, it's what you spend to invest. Bank doesn't store cash and magically conjure interest on it -- only invested money produce return and therefore interest, so bank has to balance reserves and loans to provide both safety and interest. Reserves lose value with inflation while loans, being invested, are supposed to cover inflation and provide interest on top of it -- loans' interest rises and falls with inflation, and again, it's bank's job to adjust its loans' strategy to optimize interest on deposits without depleting reserves. Therefore in a healthy economy bank deposits' interest can remain somewhat constant value above inflation. This protects "people with cash" that you were boo-hoo-hooing about -- their cash is in the bank, and in healthy economy that bank's interest is above inflation.
Banks still can cheat, and either have too low interest on deposit, over-extend their investments, impose unreasonable fees, etc. -- this is why they are in a position to cause massive damage to the economy, and have to be regulated. However rate of inflation by itself neither causes nor significantly affects their operation as long as it doesn't jump back and forth in an unpredictable manner.
Working poor, on the other hand, lack any of those protections because they don't have anything in the bank. Employer may have money in the bank, and definitely has revenue stream -- both usually adjust with inflation -- however salaries do not because employer is happy to keep it that way as long as employees don't notice. On the scale of the whole country and over decades of stagnant wages, those few percents per year produce a serious detrimental effect.
You're the one talking about predicting commodity prices in the future, aka speculation, aka gambling.
Speculation is attempting to predict something and acting on such predictions. Gambling is attempting to extract profit from unlikely events. Institutions are supposed to offset risk of their speculation with amount of capital they have, hedging and... drumroll... trading futures.
Neither have anything to do with expectation of guaranteed profit from manipulation of small quantities of commodities tied up in futures -- that would be just plain old leeching, and it contributes absolutely nothing. "Developers, QA, IT operations, analysts, traders" who expect such a thing, should not be there in the first place.
No, commodity prices in the future are unpredictable. You don't know what world events will happen tomorrow. A war could start, a cyclone could destroy crops, a meteorite could wipe out Istanbul. All these things affect prices.
This is why hedging exists. This is also why it's a good thing when speculators absorb the losses instead of the rest of the society -- they are expendable, producers and consumers are not.
None of this is affected by the aforementioned delays, and none of it makes the gambling you describe in any way justified.
In a gold economy, or in some other model with zero inflation, those working poor would be getting pay cuts.
Such a mechanism would be too expensive to implement, and it will be extremely unpopular.
Inflation does not factor into your salary, only your cash investments and debts.
Inflation only applies to prices. Debts are affected by it, and investments have nothing to do with inflation because invested money are already spent -- there is no such thing as "cash investment". It's even possible, in theory, to issue currency without affecting prices (amount of currency closely tracks expected production), the problem is, that would require precise predictions and no overhead in a financial system.
In ye olde days of the gold standard, there were still wild price swings - periods of inflation and deflation - and the poor were hurt just as badly in the short term as they are today.
I would take price swings over constant and continuous slide into poverty that society does not recognize until it's too late.
No, there will be less middlemen because it will scare off worthless daytraders. Then only institutions with enough money to dampen the price swings and enough research to predict future prices will be able to afford this, and prices will be based on value of the product.
What does that even mean? Even the minimum wage goes up.
It's not possible to survive on minimum wage, so it's irrelevant. Working poor who actually support themselves, don't get raises, so they end up sliding deeper and deeper into poverty until they can't support themselves on the salary that was acceptable before.
And yes, there are people with stagnant or declining wages - low-skill manufacturing, for instance. But if you think that "inflation" is the reason, then you need to turn that "moron" name calling on yourself. The problem for unskilled manufacturing workers is that there are people all over the world willing to work for less, and the majority of people in the developed world are more concerned with the lower prices than they are in having a manufacturing welfare system.
The problem is, that there are large groups of people whose living standard is constantly declining. This spreads poverty and crime, damaging the whole society in the process.
In other words, even with a gold standard or some other such nonsense, the same people you are claiming are getting "hurt" by inflation would have salary decreases as the value of their work declines. Same thing.
What the fuck are you talking about? Inflation is not the cause of poverty, it's merely a part of a mechanism that you ignorantly claimed to be only damaging for "people with cash".
Correct. Who is this a problem for? People with cash.
It's a problem for people on fixed salary and no savings, you moron! "People with cash" can place their savings into banks where it will "earn interest" that merely offsets the rate of inflation. People living from paycheck to paycheck -- not so much, they just can buy less and less on what remains from their ever-increasing rent.
I can assure you, total amount of lives/health lost to pollution is proportional to amount of ionizing radiation produced by pollutants, not to the number of news articles and editorials about major accidents.
you said they were less efficient. they're not. just clearing that up.
Efficient method of energy production. Not efficient thermal to electricity conversion.
what are you talking about? although a communist nation in name, it very much relied on basic economics - enormous trade imbalances,
Oh, really? You probably forgot to notice that USSR could not issue internationally accepted currency like US or EU do, and would have to take loans for any trade imbalances that it accumulated. The amount of such loans was microscopic compared to production inside the country.
dwindling reserves of foreign currencies
Why would it even have any foreign currency if it was as bad as you are claiming? USSR existed for almost 70 years, and oil trade provided any noticeable advantage only in 70's when the rest of the world had a massive oil crisis.
needed to buy food to feed itself (caused by a dearth of capital to fuel innovation and build out modern farming practices)
I lived there. The country was running as a giant nonprofit, with no significant dependence on import or export except for few areas such as grain -- mostly because of the climate. After conversion to oh-so-superior capitalism, all areas of economy, without exception, suffered a massive drop in production, and even after recovery, agriculture is now not in any way better than in 80's, so that was not a problem. And sure as Hell, nothing related to nuclear power or infrastructure development was dependent on anything other than locally available natural resources and labor -- both quite abundant.
and a drop in oil prices all proceeded to bankrupt the country.
That's idiotic revisionism of history, performed by American propaganda workers to promote destruction and looting of ex-USSR countries economy in 90's. From the end of WWII until the dissolution of USSR production growth was ahead of population growth, therefore economy was stable. The rest is bullshit, not unlike the same lackey-economists claiming that dotcom and real estate bubbles were signs of American economy's strength and stability.
actually, coal power plants are (much) more efficient than nuclear plants, in terms of wasted heat. compare the thermal efficiency of nuclear plants to coal, gas, oil, etc. and learn something new.
How is that relevant to anything? Of course, gas turbine is more efficient than steam when it comes to heat to electricity conversion -- it runs at higher temperature. But heat produced by coal or gas requires fuel from much more limited supply, and produces more pollution.
by that logic, the government could never go bankrupt no matter what it did. so why did it eventually collapse?
Politicians being stupid. USSR dissolution by itself had zero economic impact and zero economic causes -- all it accomplished was removing one level of government at the top and making 15 USSR members' government feel like they are somehow more powerful. What followed, was a massive economic crisis caused by incompetence and Libertarians at the helm.
I meant amount of energy produced per total amount of human effort necessary to produce it (counting consequences, their prevention and mitigation), but "environmentalists" can also use this:
(amount of energy produced by the plant as electricity) -------- (amount of energy in ionizing radiation produced by the pollutants dumped by the plant into the environment)
Burning coal produces, among other things, radioactive ash. And no one seems to be busy making any plans to capture and somehow store that kind of radioactive waste.
1. Chernobyl did not have massive regional consequences that were attributed to it by politicians and their propaganda. 2. "Liquidators" actually accomplished their goal of protecting the population against much more serious contamination that would happen without them. Considering the amount of available resources and knowledge about such disasters, it was a reasonable and responsible reaction then, and now we know much better ways to prepare and recover from such events. 3. Not to mention, disaster itself was caused by a chain of serious mistakes that could have been stopped at multiple points if power plant's engineers bothered to get the reactor designers' approval for what they were doing.
If anything, many aspects of Fukushima disaster (both safety measures taken at the power plant before the earthquake/thunami and handling of its consequences) are examples of downright irresponsible behavior that would be prevented by proper study of Chernobyl disaster. But nooooo, Chernobyl was supposed to be some kind of a punishment from God that happens to bad people, and therefore only relevant when it's time to refuse modernization of power plants in good old US, Germany or Japan.
Ever heard of Chernobyl, which nearly made the whole of Europe inhabitable, required 600,000 "liquidators" to be mobilised to build a cover on top of the reactor (most of which died of severe radiation poisoning less than 20 years later),
I lived in less than 100km to the North from Chernobyl power plant, and my health is better than one of most people posting here.
The scale of Chernobyl disaster was massively inflated for political reasons, and to promote the policy of replacing nuclear power plants with less efficient coal-burning ones, that you see now in Europe.
bankrupted the USSR (it cost hundred of billions of modern dollars),
It didn't, because government was on both sides of all contracts related to the cleanup. It's not US, where contractor companies gorge on money thrown at them by the government every time there is any excuse for doing so.
and removed 10 million of acres of land from Belarus and Ukraine?
Swamp land. The power plant was build in the midst of swamps.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are not talking about a gold standard, what system are you proposing?
I have not proposing anything in this discussion at all, I am explaining why your original remark about mythical "people with cash" being the only ones hurt by inflation is wrong.
I know the bank isn't invested in cash, but the depositor certainly is.
Depositor is invested in a bank, not cash. "Investment in cash" would be storing cash in a vault (or mattress) in hope that its value will rise. That only works when you have a prolonged, consistent deflation -- what means, nowhere in reality. At best one can "invest" in a currency that devalues slower than whatever currency he uses for transactions, this happens when local currency experiences runaway inflation far beyond growth of production.
Similarly, you mention the bank being required to hold reserves - ultimately these are just a cash balance with the Federal Reserve. That is about as much a "cash investment" as you can possibly have.
Reserve is the opposite of investment -- it's un-invested money that must be present to cover current and expected transactions and offset risk. Banks would love nothing more than to operate with as little reserves as possible, because reserves lose value over time. The problem is, without sufficient reserves they expose themselves and their clients to excessive risk -- short term if they can't cover current transactions, long-term if they can't offset occasional defaulted loans.
The greatest problem of recent bailout is that financial institutions tapped into public money after their reserves could not cover spectacularly bad investments. That meant, money were produced at a rate as if the system is working, however investments failed to produce any value -- economy did not grow, and excess of injected money merely diluted existing ones. Banks tout the fact that they "paid back" the bailout loans, however this is a mere distraction from the real issue -- all such loans would be "paid back" due to ever-increasing money supply, this time they just produced no growth of economy that increasing money supply relies on. This is one of many mechanisms that can produce inflation spikes, however damage to the economy comes not from inflation but from those mechanisms themselves. The fact that high rates of inflation can do direct damage to the living conditions of large groups of people, is just the cherry on top.
I'm not "boo-hooing". I'm pointing out that the only people hurt by constant, predictable inflation are those with cash investments - and you rightly point out that they are compensated by interest. I'm the one arguing that constant, predictable inflation is not a big problem.
For those people -- not a problem at all, unless banks are greedy enough to keep interest below inflation. What sometimes is the case, so those deposits are merely suffer less from inflation. Either is better than nothing at all.
They also lack any exposure, since they have nothing in the bank. If they do have money in the bank, it probably bears little or no interest (like in a checking account).
Their life is their "exposure". They are under constant risk of living expenses outgrowing their income -- and their spending is nearly absolutely inflexible. Where it is flexible, it's even worse -- trying to save on quality of food, for example, increases risk of diseases that will permanently damage their ability to work, even without taking direct medical expenses into account.
This is an extremely high risk, higher than for any other category in society. In fact, it is higher than the risk of most criminal activities, what explains why it's a perfectly rational choice for working poor to turn to crime -- their risk goes down that way.
I'm sure they are. But if you think that the working poor don't notice, I don't think you are listening very hard. Half of
Solution: don't let "average coders" write software. If standards were that low in medicine, people would drop dead right and left thanks to "average doctors" not being able to tell flu from the hole in the ground. Fortunately, "average doctors" like those are simply not allowed to practice, and only competent ones are actually treat sick people.
Software development has exactly the same problem -- decades ago all software had lax requirements, so programmers with abilities of an average shaman from a primitive tribe could be allowed to work on any project. Now this is not the case because software is more important, and people realize that requirements have to be strict. Just like with doctors, it will work just fine, as long as idiots, charlatans, retards and people with no capabilities to be a good programmer, will be prevented from doing anything that others depend on.
What on earth are you talking about? Getting a pay cut is too expensive to implement? The poor took pay cuts all the time prior to the abolition of the gold standard. Hell, they are getting pay cuts now, even with constant rates of planned inflation.
Both pay cut and pay raise requires administrative expenses. Employers would have trouble constantly adjusting low-paid employees' salary to keep up with inflation even if they wanted to, and on top of this, there is no incentive because employees do not realize how the purchasing power of their salaries is dwindling.
Also shut up about gold standard. It has absolutely nothing to do with this.
??? A bank account is a cash investment. A loan is a cash investment. Taking your money and putting it in a safe is a cash investment. Bank accounts, loans, and a safe full of money all lose value with inflation.
Cash is not an investment, it's what you spend to invest. Bank doesn't store cash and magically conjure interest on it -- only invested money produce return and therefore interest, so bank has to balance reserves and loans to provide both safety and interest. Reserves lose value with inflation while loans, being invested, are supposed to cover inflation and provide interest on top of it -- loans' interest rises and falls with inflation, and again, it's bank's job to adjust its loans' strategy to optimize interest on deposits without depleting reserves. Therefore in a healthy economy bank deposits' interest can remain somewhat constant value above inflation. This protects "people with cash" that you were boo-hoo-hooing about -- their cash is in the bank, and in healthy economy that bank's interest is above inflation.
Banks still can cheat, and either have too low interest on deposit, over-extend their investments, impose unreasonable fees, etc. -- this is why they are in a position to cause massive damage to the economy, and have to be regulated. However rate of inflation by itself neither causes nor significantly affects their operation as long as it doesn't jump back and forth in an unpredictable manner.
Working poor, on the other hand, lack any of those protections because they don't have anything in the bank. Employer may have money in the bank, and definitely has revenue stream -- both usually adjust with inflation -- however salaries do not because employer is happy to keep it that way as long as employees don't notice. On the scale of the whole country and over decades of stagnant wages, those few percents per year produce a serious detrimental effect.
You're the one talking about predicting commodity prices in the future, aka speculation, aka gambling.
Speculation is attempting to predict something and acting on such predictions. Gambling is attempting to extract profit from unlikely events. Institutions are supposed to offset risk of their speculation with amount of capital they have, hedging and... drumroll... trading futures.
Neither have anything to do with expectation of guaranteed profit from manipulation of small quantities of commodities tied up in futures -- that would be just plain old leeching, and it contributes absolutely nothing. "Developers, QA, IT operations, analysts, traders" who expect such a thing, should not be there in the first place.
FBI should buy more dogs.
No, commodity prices in the future are unpredictable. You don't know what world events will happen tomorrow. A war could start, a cyclone could destroy crops, a meteorite could wipe out Istanbul. All these things affect prices.
This is why hedging exists. This is also why it's a good thing when speculators absorb the losses instead of the rest of the society -- they are expendable, producers and consumers are not.
None of this is affected by the aforementioned delays, and none of it makes the gambling you describe in any way justified.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but one doesn't "predict future prices".
In a healthy market, one does -- in fact, that's the only thing that happens in a healthy market. The rest is bullshit.
In a gold economy, or in some other model with zero inflation, those working poor would be getting pay cuts.
Such a mechanism would be too expensive to implement, and it will be extremely unpopular.
Inflation does not factor into your salary, only your cash investments and debts.
Inflation only applies to prices. Debts are affected by it, and investments have nothing to do with inflation because invested money are already spent -- there is no such thing as "cash investment". It's even possible, in theory, to issue currency without affecting prices (amount of currency closely tracks expected production), the problem is, that would require precise predictions and no overhead in a financial system.
In ye olde days of the gold standard, there were still wild price swings - periods of inflation and deflation - and the poor were hurt just as badly in the short term as they are today.
I would take price swings over constant and continuous slide into poverty that society does not recognize until it's too late.
Police wants UK Government To Google Copyright.
It doesn't.
It doesn't even investigate Rambus for fraud.
No, there will be less middlemen because it will scare off worthless daytraders. Then only institutions with enough money to dampen the price swings and enough research to predict future prices will be able to afford this, and prices will be based on value of the product.
What does that even mean? Even the minimum wage goes up.
It's not possible to survive on minimum wage, so it's irrelevant. Working poor who actually support themselves, don't get raises, so they end up sliding deeper and deeper into poverty until they can't support themselves on the salary that was acceptable before.
And yes, there are people with stagnant or declining wages - low-skill manufacturing, for instance. But if you think that "inflation" is the reason, then you need to turn that "moron" name calling on yourself. The problem for unskilled manufacturing workers is that there are people all over the world willing to work for less, and the majority of people in the developed world are more concerned with the lower prices than they are in having a manufacturing welfare system.
The problem is, that there are large groups of people whose living standard is constantly declining. This spreads poverty and crime, damaging the whole society in the process.
In other words, even with a gold standard or some other such nonsense, the same people you are claiming are getting "hurt" by inflation would have salary decreases as the value of their work declines. Same thing.
What the fuck are you talking about? Inflation is not the cause of poverty, it's merely a part of a mechanism that you ignorantly claimed to be only damaging for "people with cash".
Great!!! Less pointless trades, less artificial volatility, more incentive to keep fair price, less middlemen.
Correct. Who is this a problem for? People with cash.
It's a problem for people on fixed salary and no savings, you moron! "People with cash" can place their savings into banks where it will "earn interest" that merely offsets the rate of inflation. People living from paycheck to paycheck -- not so much, they just can buy less and less on what remains from their ever-increasing rent.
I can assure you, total amount of lives/health lost to pollution is proportional to amount of ionizing radiation produced by pollutants, not to the number of news articles and editorials about major accidents.
you said they were less efficient. they're not. just clearing that up.
Efficient method of energy production. Not efficient thermal to electricity conversion.
what are you talking about? although a communist nation in name, it very much relied on basic economics - enormous trade imbalances,
Oh, really? You probably forgot to notice that USSR could not issue internationally accepted currency like US or EU do, and would have to take loans for any trade imbalances that it accumulated. The amount of such loans was microscopic compared to production inside the country.
dwindling reserves of foreign currencies
Why would it even have any foreign currency if it was as bad as you are claiming? USSR existed for almost 70 years, and oil trade provided any noticeable advantage only in 70's when the rest of the world had a massive oil crisis.
needed to buy food to feed itself (caused by a dearth of capital to fuel innovation and build out modern farming practices)
I lived there. The country was running as a giant nonprofit, with no significant dependence on import or export except for few areas such as grain -- mostly because of the climate. After conversion to oh-so-superior capitalism, all areas of economy, without exception, suffered a massive drop in production, and even after recovery, agriculture is now not in any way better than in 80's, so that was not a problem. And sure as Hell, nothing related to nuclear power or infrastructure development was dependent on anything other than locally available natural resources and labor -- both quite abundant.
and a drop in oil prices all proceeded to bankrupt the country.
That's idiotic revisionism of history, performed by American propaganda workers to promote destruction and looting of ex-USSR countries economy in 90's. From the end of WWII until the dissolution of USSR production growth was ahead of population growth, therefore economy was stable. The rest is bullshit, not unlike the same lackey-economists claiming that dotcom and real estate bubbles were signs of American economy's strength and stability.
Averaged over all power plants and over their total energy production? Yes, definitely so.
Oh, wait...
actually, coal power plants are (much) more efficient than nuclear plants, in terms of wasted heat. compare the thermal efficiency of nuclear plants to coal, gas, oil, etc. and learn something new.
How is that relevant to anything? Of course, gas turbine is more efficient than steam when it comes to heat to electricity conversion -- it runs at higher temperature. But heat produced by coal or gas requires fuel from much more limited supply, and produces more pollution.
by that logic, the government could never go bankrupt no matter what it did. so why did it eventually collapse?
Politicians being stupid. USSR dissolution by itself had zero economic impact and zero economic causes -- all it accomplished was removing one level of government at the top and making 15 USSR members' government feel like they are somehow more powerful. What followed, was a massive economic crisis caused by incompetence and Libertarians at the helm.
why were they desperate for funds from germany?
Corruption.
I meant amount of energy produced per total amount of human effort necessary to produce it (counting consequences, their prevention and mitigation), but "environmentalists" can also use this:
(amount of energy produced by the plant as electricity)
--------
(amount of energy in ionizing radiation produced by the pollutants dumped by the plant into the environment)
Burning coal produces, among other things, radioactive ash. And no one seems to be busy making any plans to capture and somehow store that kind of radioactive waste.
My point is:
1. Chernobyl did not have massive regional consequences that were attributed to it by politicians and their propaganda.
2. "Liquidators" actually accomplished their goal of protecting the population against much more serious contamination that would happen without them. Considering the amount of available resources and knowledge about such disasters, it was a reasonable and responsible reaction then, and now we know much better ways to prepare and recover from such events.
3. Not to mention, disaster itself was caused by a chain of serious mistakes that could have been stopped at multiple points if power plant's engineers bothered to get the reactor designers' approval for what they were doing.
If anything, many aspects of Fukushima disaster (both safety measures taken at the power plant before the earthquake/thunami and handling of its consequences) are examples of downright irresponsible behavior that would be prevented by proper study of Chernobyl disaster. But nooooo, Chernobyl was supposed to be some kind of a punishment from God that happens to bad people, and therefore only relevant when it's time to refuse modernization of power plants in good old US, Germany or Japan.
Yes.
It's not done until it's done, and there is no way to estimate anything at this point.
Ever heard of Chernobyl, which nearly made the whole of Europe inhabitable, required 600,000 "liquidators" to be mobilised to build a cover on top of the reactor (most of which died of severe radiation poisoning less than 20 years later),
I lived in less than 100km to the North from Chernobyl power plant, and my health is better than one of most people posting here.
The scale of Chernobyl disaster was massively inflated for political reasons, and to promote the policy of replacing nuclear power plants with less efficient coal-burning ones, that you see now in Europe.
bankrupted the USSR (it cost hundred of billions of modern dollars),
It didn't, because government was on both sides of all contracts related to the cleanup. It's not US, where contractor companies gorge on money thrown at them by the government every time there is any excuse for doing so.
and removed 10 million of acres of land from Belarus and Ukraine?
Swamp land. The power plant was build in the midst of swamps.
Hahahahahahaha!
No, really,
Hahahahahahaha!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
THEIR host keys and everything that can be decrypted using those keys.