Impeachment may have been worthwhile years ago, but at this point unfortunately it would be hugely counterproductive. It's far too late to really accomplish much of anything, and all the other asshats would have a field day politicizing it for the next election.
I beg to disagree, Impeachment is as important now as it ever was, and should be pursued (IMHO) even after the present administration has left office.
Why? Because the basic purpose of impeachment is not political theater, throwing the bums out, or any of the other nonsense that is commonly cited. Impeachment is about investigating plausible claims of wrong doing by high ranking officials and if the claims are true meting out appropriate consequences.
We are in a very risky point in our history, but not because of the offenses against our constitution presently being perpetrated, but rather because of the precedent we setting by ignoring them. The third amendment
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
is interesting in that it is the only part of the Bill of Rights that the present administration hasn't been plausibly accused of violating. And yet we do nothing.
So turn the question around: if we aren't going to impeach now, when would we? And what sort of message does that send to future administrations, of either party?
I never said deal with immunity "later". I said deal with them as separate issues.
Then you should be agreeing strongly with the people who want the immunity provisions removed from the PAA, and objecting to the (mostly Republican) efforts to tie them together. Is this in fact your position?
How is anyone at liberty under the threat of being bombed anywhere at any time?
The American position used to be "Give me Liberty or give me Death," and people who argued the position you appear to be advocating were routinely derided as cowards. Do you believe the phrase "give me liberty or give me death" is in fact meaningless, and that in fact no principle is worth standing up for if it means any personal risk (since the principle won't do you any good if you are dead--or, as you put it, "under threat")? How would you distinguish this from rank cowardice?
Yet all the loonies come out and say - "ooohh, he has some dangerous ideas and must be silenced" (or at least modded down on slashdot - not much different, just not carried out to the same extreme).
Now look who's putting words in other people's mouths. I never said you should be silenced, and in any case could not be using mod points on you even if I had them since I am clearly posting in this thread. Perhaps the reason you are being modded down is that you are spouting borderline off-topic nonsense and getting hysterical about it? Do you think, perhaps, that might have something to do with it?
Is your idea of debating a legitimate issue - intervening and interdicting terrorism - launching a straw man attack against politicians and "evil" big corportations... or private citizens who don't happen to agree with you?
No. But the topic is the telco immunity provision, not "intervening and interdicting terrorism" whatever that is.
This is why those on the left don't manage to get anything done. Their whole strategy is to bash others who propose solutions and come up with no solutions on their own.
First, I'm coming from the right (life long Republican and current Ron Paul supporter), so that jibe just plain misses the mark. But since when and on what basis is insisting that no one is above the law been "bashing others who propose solutions"?
Why not come up with an ACTUAL WORKING SOLUTION to the problem terrorism, as was the original topic of this discussion?
Sure thing. So long as you come up with a cure for cancer first.
Other lawbreaking (such as the allegations against telcos and whatnot) can still be dealt with - that is a separate issue. Leave out there, don't sweep it under the rug... but don't use it as a means of obstructing our national defense, either.
First, the whole point of this discussion is that, if they pass the immunity, it can't be dealt with later. That's what immunity means. Further, the people "obstructing the national defense" here as you construe it are mostly on the right, not the left. It's Cheney, Sessions, McConnel, etc. (all Republicans, I'm ashamed to admit) who are insisting that the PAA must die if they can't get immunity for their pals. So get your facts straight, OK?
...it doesn't matter to me whether you think the law is good or bad,
So, you want to join the debate about this bill but you don't care what anyone thinks about the bill? Won't that sort of hinder your ability to engage in rational discourse?
Bottom line is: there needs to be a way to be able to monitor terrorist activity, criminal actvity... ANY KIND OF THREAT BEING PLANNED.
See? The discussion is over the attempt to rid the bill of a provision protecting telecoms from the consequences of their past criminal activity. This has nothing whatsoever to do with monitoring terrorist activities, apart from the fact that certain members of congress (Jeff Sessions, for example) led by VP Cheney are willing to scuttle the bill if they can't get their friends a "get out of jial free" card.
We've been damned fortunate and thwarted every single planned attack since 9/11... we've batted 1.000 so far. At some point, we're going to be nailed again unless a way is found to MONITOR future plans.
Uh, what attacks would that be? And how does that have anything to do with the PAA which, as I just pointed out, has little or nothing to do with the telecom immunity? As far as I recall, all of the so-called "threats" that have been thwarted have turned out to be bogus, and none of them--none of them were found using the powers under PAA. So what's the connection?
I'm not suggesting we totally roll over to the authorities and have Big Brother watch every single thing every American does. But Common Sense dictates that SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE.
Perhaps. But even if, as you say, "SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE" a minute's thought leads to the conclusion that giving big corporations a blank check to violate our nations laws probably isn't it.
I'm willing to give Paul and Kucinich a lot of credit for being honest. In general, I'll even vote for an honest politician who I disagree with on some or many things over a dishonest one who agrees with me, but at some point you have to say "okay, that's just a little TOO crazy". Paul and Kucinich are well past that line.
I think the point that you are missing here is that you have no guarantee that the dishonest ones are any less crazy. Suppose it comes down to Clinton and Huckabee, for example. How sure are you that they aren't as crazy (or crazier) than Paul and Kucinich, but just able to hide it better?
If they'd taken the time to do a full and fair recount, Gore would have won. We know this because after the fact the recounts were done. While Bush would have won under some of the deals the lawyers were kicking around Gore would have won had the simply followed the laws as written.
So let me get this straight: we can't even get a commitment from this DOJ to enforce to enforce things like the laws against torture or the constitutional authority of congress to conduct oversight into the actions of the executive branch, trust them not to use their power for partisan purposes, or even to hire qualified people who graduated from real law schools, but we're going to let them start filing civil suits on behalf of plaintiffs who (generally) could well afford to file for themselves, and would, if they had a shred of merit?
So from my use of a disparaging name for one of the sources you assume that I approve of the other, and that I must consider it "intrinsically better"? For the record, I don't hold either of them in very high regard, but that is neither here nor there since my whole point was that the tests were in dispute and for that all I need is the fact that they are disputing the tests.
To make this painfully clear: I can note that Suni and Shia, or Catholics and Protestants, or fans of Bozo-X and fans of Bimbo-Y on American Idol dispute each other's claims without agreeing with (or even respecting) either of them. And I can cite them to substantiate my claim that there is a dispute without thereby taking sides. You aren't required to convert to Catholicism to link to a Catholic web site.
The rest of your post indicates equal lack of comprehension, both of the issues at hand, and of what I wrote.
Independent tests do not support the army's conclusions.
Nor do they cleanly invalidate them.
Nor did I claim that they did. Nice strawman though.
The article plainly states (in several places) that these tests were not the equivalent of the Army tests, and the Dragon Skin vests were not subjected (by the independent investigator) to the full range of enviromental tests that the Army requires.
Can you point me to someone that has managed to reproduce the Army's claimed failure mode? Because otherwise harping on the fact that the independent tests only cast doubt on parts of the Army's test is rather silly. As General Downing said:
Dragon Skin appears to have done much better than what those Army tests would have indicated,...we did not see today the types of failures that were described in that very controversial [Army] test report."
If someone makes a claim, someone else tests it and finds it to be suspect, does it really make sense to complain "Oh, but you didn't test the rest of their claims"?
And repeating MSN's conclusions without (seemingly) understanding the caveats they place on each and every page proves what exactly? That sources you approve of are intrinsically better than sources you disaprove of?
I don't know where in the heck that came from. My point was that the initial Army report has been disputed. To make such a point, it is typical to provide a link to someone raising disputed points, not just repeating the original claims as if they were undisputed. It has nothing to do with sources I approve of or disapprove of, and everything to do with pointing out where I got the information that there was a dispute in the first place.
Disclaimer: I don't much care about the debate either way. Not that the disclaimer will sway anyone - politics are generally more important than intellectual honesty.
What in the heck is this supposed to mean? You are trying to sway people into believing that you don't care about a debate "either way" in your response to my post pointing out that the debate exists, but you don't think you can sway them into believing in your indifference because politics (which hasn't even been mentioned prior to your post) is generally more important than intellectual honesty?
Independent tests do not support the army's conclusions. Since there is already some question about the validity of the army's tests (e.g. the designer of the vest that "won" in the army's test says that dragon skin is actually better, the person who conducted the army tests left to work for a dragon skin competitor, etc.) I don't think just repeating the army's conclusions (or quoting the Washington Compost as doing so) really proves anything.
Where, in the link you cited, does it say anything about the UN being certain that Iran has a weapons program? All I see are sanctions for their refusal to halt activities which, as the Iranian delegate points out, they are perfectly entitled to engage in under the non-proliferation treaty.
It's not just the US.
What, other countries are trying to feed bogus "intelligence" to the UN too? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked.
Although international concern is growing about Iran's nuclear program and its regional ambitions, diplomats here say most U.S. intelligence shared with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has proved inaccurate and none has led to significant discoveries inside Iran. [...]
"Since 2002, pretty much all the intelligence that's come to us has proved to be wrong," a senior diplomat at the IAEA said. Another official here described the agency's intelligence stream as "very cold now" because "so little panned out."
If I had to guess, the Iranian's claim to have a viable space program and the US claim that the Iranians have a viable weapons program are both about as reliable as the previous claims about Iraq and the smoking guns that were going to be mushroom clouds. I suppose I'm slightly more skeptical of the weapons programs claims, if only because Dick "never right about anything" Cheney has weighed in in support of the story.
...having a pernicious effect on our tendency to trust what seems genuine."
If you haven't had this tendency whacked out of you be daily life you need to get out more, or do something other than stare at a blank wall while you're in.
Seriously. A month of almost any sort of social activity (or twenty minutes in a few bars I know of) should fix it. As should a few year's experience debugging other people's code, working in retail, or even watching nature shows on TV ("Wasps do what?!? That's seriously messed up dude!").
Heck, just open an e-mail account.
If you have a tendency to trust things just because they seem genuine you are in deep, deep trouble. And that fact hasn't changed for millions of years.
I haven't seen a story for John McCain or Hillary Clinton.
The two candidates you mentioned are presently experiencing technical difficulties that make it difficult to run story about their position on issues such as stem cell research, network neutrality, etc. With a very few exceptions (McCain support escalating the war in Iraq even more than Bush, Clinton is opposed to flag burning) neither of them seem able to come up with a single clear and consistent position on an issue.
In general Clinton can't seem to take a stand on either side of an issue, and McCain can't seem to refrain from taking a stand on both.
Maybe the best solution would be to run a story on their positions ("Clinton and McCain collectively support and oppose stem cell research, a guest worker program, the great wall of Arizona, soft money, torture, and a prohibition on the gratuitous use of the word 'Belgium' in video games") and them let them wait until their focus groups have decided what they should think before getting into which of them took which position.
Financial: defense contractors are pretty high up on the campaign contribution list.
That's certainly plausible, but it doesn't explain why we only hit oil-rich countries. North Korea could have been just as costly, and easier to justify.
Religious: hopes of starting Armageddon because you have faith that you are going to be raptured up.
Sadly, I'd have to admit that this is also plausible. But it still doesn't explain why Iraq.
Political: We had to take Saddam out, because we were the ones that put him in power in the first place. Basically fixing your past mistakes without actually owning up to them.
This one just doesn't hold water. I can't think of a single instance where any nation in history went back to fix their mistakes without some other, stronger motive.
The oil? Eh... there would be cheaper ways than this war to get it.
Ah, but they didn't want to get it, they wanted to control it. And they didn't think the war would cost nearly as much as it did. And finally, even if there were cost overruns, we, the tax paying American public, our sons and daughters in the national guard, and the Iraqi's are the ones paying the costs. And note that the cost overruns both feed directly into your other points (war profiteering and PWIFs wanting to hear the last trumpet sound.
In other words, although much of what you said is plausible, none of it argues against the reason we chose Iraq to invade being the oil.
The problem isn't coming up with a way to do it, it's getting people to buy into it. There are lots of ways to cut down on our use of fossil fuels (nuclear, space-based solar, etc.) and there are lots of ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere (though most if not all of the best ones involve plants and sunlight). But we have a huge culture/industry built around the notion of burning fossil fuels and that isn't going away any time soon. Given that they are willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to finesse access to a small fraction of the worlds fossil fuels, a $25 million dollar prize (heck even if they made it $25 billion) isn't going to matter squat.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And if you want to argue that the war isn't about oil, you need to start by coming up with a non-discredited alternative explanation and at least sketch out why it doesn't apply to any of the more obvious targets who aren't sitting on a bunch of oil.
Great. Just what we need--yet another way to shuffle content around.
Am I the only one that things the real bottle neck is finding the time to read and think about all this information--and that yet another layer of goo, no matter how scriptastic, isn't really going to address the fundamental problem of information overload?
An even greater effect should come about from orbital mechanics; most collisions should result in most of the material dropping into a lower or more elliptical orbit (to eventially burn up), some of it being ejected altogether, and a diminishing fraction of it remaining in LEO.
Well, distributed power is fundementally more robust than centralized power (in many more senses than that intended here) and so roof top installation beats any gains that might be had from say a south west US deployment, or a space deployment. Had we had decentralized solar power after Katrina or Rita, the recovery logistics would have been much more managable owing to surviving refridgeration. The population displacement would have been much less.
Agreed. My main motivation for backing space-based deployment is to move industry off-earth. And if you look at what has happened throughout history, industry goes to where the energy and raw materials are located.
In terms of safety, anti-islanding circuits cover the main hazard that is not already present with electric power.
Not quite. The main hazard will be un-trained (or at least less trained) people maintaining power generating equipment. While the per incident risks are lower the number of incidents will be much higher. I'd expect it to follow the same basic curve as transportation, with air travel being much safer than driving even though airplane crashes are much more dramatic than car crashes.
I think you are using an average value for solar power at the bottom of the atmosphere, 1000 W/m^2 is closer for noon and averaging including night is about 250 W/m^2 at the cloud deck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt at 320 MW/m^2.
Our panels are about 15% efficient.
Ditto, by saying thirty percent. The net effect of both of these would be that you'd need to cover an area three times as large as the greater LA metro area, instead of equal to it.
Our production capacity is 500 MW peak/plant/year. Repacing existing generation capacity in a decade requires 200 fabrication plants, a tidy number but not so bad if you consider the world market as well and give 4 decades of use per plant before needing to replace installed stock.
I'm not sure what you're addressing here; I was talking about how much space the solar panels themselves would take up, not about the production of them.
Again, it is important to realize that old panels are worth $25/kilo as scrap. They are not waste but rather fall rather neatly into the cradle-to-cradle paradigm. An old solar panel is just a cheaper way to get a new solar panel since it is already low impurity silicon.
Recycling is great, and a good way to address the problem of waste. Any idea how many cycles you can go?
Silicon fabrication does involve some chemical processes that need to be looked at. However, much of this work has already been done by the Rocky Mountain Institute in collaboration with Texas Instruments. It's under control.
I actually did a little digging on my own and am willing to accept that conclusion. I might take you up on the conference call invitation, but I'm in the middle of an international move and so it may not make sense to even try.
The operational safety and environmental impact of solar needs to be considered though. A typical nuclear reactor generates in the 1000MW range, and even at 30% efficiency (higher than we're likely to get to any time soon) and absolutely no cloud cover you are looking at something like 320*0.3 W/m^2 = 100W/m^2, so and equivalent solar plant is going to occupy 1000,000,000 W / (100 W/m^2) = 10,000,000 m^2, or ten million square meters just for the collectors. If you are going to replace all of the existing capacity with solar you will need roughly a thousand of these (1,000,000 MW total US capacity / 1000 MW per plant), or ten billion m^2 of collectors.
To put it in perspective, you are talking about an roughly the size of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. There are going to be safety and environmental consequences of operating anything this large, no matter how you slice it. Clearly there will be industrial accidents on a regular basis if you run it as a single monolithic structure (even if just moving people and materials around), and it gets worse (though harder to track) if you split it up into lots of little facilities (say, one on every roof top).
Assuming the active surfaces weighs 1 Kg/m^2 (an underestimate) and last on average 50 years (an over estimate) you will still have 20,000 metric tons of toxic waste a year (not counting manufacturing waste to deal with). While still much better than fossil fuels (which produce that much in well under a day) it needs to be considered.
--MarkusQ
P.S. I think we both agree on the gals here, and the quibbles are about means. My preferred solar power scenario is to put it (and much of our industry) out in space. But even your "solar panels everywhere" scenario is better than what we have now.
If they weren't going to sue before, this may make them angry enough to do so now-- and they might have a better case.
Just out of curiosity, and assuming of course that everything he wrote is true, what exactly would that better case be? "Your honor, he told the truth about events that he personally witnessed, and in a public forum to boot!"? Or maybe "He directed more traffic to our web site and potentially posted our Google page rank, with malice aforethought!"?
Well, you want to look at the placement of the plants. Many are in fairly high population density regions.
I've heard this offered as an explanation for why nuclear is so much less popular than fossil fuels. While the probabilistic number of people killed is much lower than the actual number being killed by fossil fuels right now the people killed by fossil fuels are mostly the poor (e.g. black lung), foreigners (e.g. oil wars) and elderly (e.g. premature death due to pollution) whereas a nuclear accident might kill the people who are actually using the power.
Now, you are arguing that nuclear is better than coal or oil, and instantaneously it is likely less deadly, but you have also missed what I said about the waste being nastier than the fuel.
Get some perspective here. Not only are fossil fuels more deadly in the short run, but they are far, far more dangerous in the long run. Look at Venus. At the north pole, in the dead of winter, it's a balmy 750 degrees. That's what runaway greenhouse looks like. If you were forced and gunpoint to move into either the "dead zone" around one of your worst-case nuclear scare stories, or a planet sized pizza oven, which would you choose?
Mammals are evolved to tolerate uranium, but all the plutonium was gone by the time we came along. Waste storage needs to segregate a portion of the Earth from mammals very tightly because our biology does not know how to protect itself from plutonium.
This is the standard "conflate chemical toxicity with radiation danger" shell game. But it is a shell game. Our bodies do not deal well with any heavy metal in soluble form. It doesn't matter where they come from or (to a large extent) what they are. The actinoids (including plutonium and uranium) are chemically indistinguishable. Our bodies simply can't tell them apart, and there is absolutely no difference in our ability to tolerate them.
The whole leaving the Earth to the roaches nonsense is right out of the oil industry's anti-nuclear energy playbook, 1955-1975 editions, when they actively encouraged this meme despite the fact that it has no basis in fact. And, in case you wonder, radiation won't make the bugs big, and it won't make them glow, either.
We can displace both coal and nuclear with solar much faster than we can displace coal with nuclear and we can do it cheaper
I find this claim hard to believe. Can you source it? And does it take into account the ecological consequences of producing and deploying the solar panels, and the risks associated with maintaining them?
Well, no my argument was an event that is 50-50 every 20 years. Half of them you say Phewwww! and the other half, well lots of people die.
Take a look at the list, the distribution is disturbingly well populated.
I seem to have missed the ones where lots of people die. In the first dozen, no one dies at all; in the whole list we have well under a hundred dead (the bulk, as you note, in Chornobyl), which compares very favorably to the number killed in fossil fuel power generation. If you want, we can include the "statistically increased chance of death in the general population" numbers too, but they will make fossil fuels look even worse even if you just take into account the emphysema, lung cancer, and asthma figures and ignore things like black lung deaths of coal miners, oil drilling accidents, and the hundreds of thousands killed in wars over oil.
In addition, I stand by my earlier statement: you are attempting to extrapolate from a very small data set (the few cases with any actual deaths and not just rules violations) and this isn't a valid way to reason.
On Yucca Mountain, a permanent repository which the courts have essentially killed, the problem is attempting to engineer on time scales that are geological.
If it was, as you admit, killed by the courts than the proximal cause is lawyers, not engineers. As I said before, it was killed by politics. The whole engineering and time scale argument misses the point.
Permanent storage does not work because we can't make permanent work.
Nor have we any need to. This goes back to the fundamental illogic of the whole waste disposal argument. Things with a long half life are, by definition, more stable and thus less dangerous. And because of the way in which chain reactions (including sub-critical reactions) work, spread out is safer than concentrated (sometimes much safer). But to hear most anti-nuclear people talk, the goal is to confine the wastes in a small space, and keep them there for a very long time because we are worrying about the elements with the long half lives.
They are, in short, about as logical as the global warming deniers, and for good reason: in many cases they get their talking points from the same sort of fossil fuel industry funded "scientists." I know that you are aware of this problem when it comes to global warming.
This is the reason that transmutation is the only responsible option on the table right now. Doing this with lower energy inputs should be the main focus of research. Glass does not stand the test of geological time. Ask any beach.
Nuts. By pushing the time frame out to "permanent" and "geological time" you are just flat out misrepresenting the actual issues.
If you could get solar for cheaper than nuclear right now wouldn't you?
Of course I would. But not to the exclusion of nuclear. And in any case, I wouldn't get too smug about the prospects for solar. If it is ever perceived as a serious threat to fossil fuels, it will get the smear and FUD treatment too.
Slashdot Mirror
I beg to disagree, Impeachment is as important now as it ever was, and should be pursued (IMHO) even after the present administration has left office.
Why? Because the basic purpose of impeachment is not political theater, throwing the bums out, or any of the other nonsense that is commonly cited. Impeachment is about investigating plausible claims of wrong doing by high ranking officials and if the claims are true meting out appropriate consequences. We are in a very risky point in our history, but not because of the offenses against our constitution presently being perpetrated, but rather because of the precedent we setting by ignoring them. The third amendment
is interesting in that it is the only part of the Bill of Rights that the present administration hasn't been plausibly accused of violating. And yet we do nothing.
So turn the question around: if we aren't going to impeach now, when would we? And what sort of message does that send to future administrations, of either party?
--MarkusQ
They just kicked them to the curb? In my day they would have kicked them to the moon. Yes, Alice, to the moooooon.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And yes, statistically speaking, I probably am older than you.
Then you should be agreeing strongly with the people who want the immunity provisions removed from the PAA, and objecting to the (mostly Republican) efforts to tie them together. Is this in fact your position?
The American position used to be "Give me Liberty or give me Death," and people who argued the position you appear to be advocating were routinely derided as cowards. Do you believe the phrase "give me liberty or give me death" is in fact meaningless, and that in fact no principle is worth standing up for if it means any personal risk (since the principle won't do you any good if you are dead--or, as you put it, "under threat")? How would you distinguish this from rank cowardice?
Now look who's putting words in other people's mouths. I never said you should be silenced, and in any case could not be using mod points on you even if I had them since I am clearly posting in this thread. Perhaps the reason you are being modded down is that you are spouting borderline off-topic nonsense and getting hysterical about it? Do you think, perhaps, that might have something to do with it?
--MarkusQ
No. But the topic is the telco immunity provision, not "intervening and interdicting terrorism" whatever that is.
First, I'm coming from the right (life long Republican and current Ron Paul supporter), so that jibe just plain misses the mark. But since when and on what basis is insisting that no one is above the law been "bashing others who propose solutions"?
Sure thing. So long as you come up with a cure for cancer first.
First, the whole point of this discussion is that, if they pass the immunity, it can't be dealt with later. That's what immunity means. Further, the people "obstructing the national defense" here as you construe it are mostly on the right, not the left. It's Cheney, Sessions, McConnel, etc. (all Republicans, I'm ashamed to admit) who are insisting that the PAA must die if they can't get immunity for their pals. So get your facts straight, OK?
--MarkusQ
So, you want to join the debate about this bill but you don't care what anyone thinks about the bill? Won't that sort of hinder your ability to engage in rational discourse?
See? The discussion is over the attempt to rid the bill of a provision protecting telecoms from the consequences of their past criminal activity. This has nothing whatsoever to do with monitoring terrorist activities, apart from the fact that certain members of congress (Jeff Sessions, for example) led by VP Cheney are willing to scuttle the bill if they can't get their friends a "get out of jial free" card.
Uh, what attacks would that be? And how does that have anything to do with the PAA which, as I just pointed out, has little or nothing to do with the telecom immunity? As far as I recall, all of the so-called "threats" that have been thwarted have turned out to be bogus, and none of them--none of them were found using the powers under PAA. So what's the connection?
Perhaps. But even if, as you say, "SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE" a minute's thought leads to the conclusion that giving big corporations a blank check to violate our nations laws probably isn't it.
--MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
If they'd taken the time to do a full and fair recount, Gore would have won. We know this because after the fact the recounts were done. While Bush would have won under some of the deals the lawyers were kicking around Gore would have won had the simply followed the laws as written.
-- MarkusQ
So let me get this straight: we can't even get a commitment from this DOJ to enforce to enforce things like the laws against torture or the constitutional authority of congress to conduct oversight into the actions of the executive branch, trust them not to use their power for partisan purposes, or even to hire qualified people who graduated from real law schools, but we're going to let them start filing civil suits on behalf of plaintiffs who (generally) could well afford to file for themselves, and would, if they had a shred of merit?
Great. That's just great.
--MarkusQ
So from my use of a disparaging name for one of the sources you assume that I approve of the other, and that I must consider it "intrinsically better"? For the record, I don't hold either of them in very high regard, but that is neither here nor there since my whole point was that the tests were in dispute and for that all I need is the fact that they are disputing the tests.
To make this painfully clear: I can note that Suni and Shia, or Catholics and Protestants, or fans of Bozo-X and fans of Bimbo-Y on American Idol dispute each other's claims without agreeing with (or even respecting) either of them. And I can cite them to substantiate my claim that there is a dispute without thereby taking sides. You aren't required to convert to Catholicism to link to a Catholic web site.
The feeling is mutual.
--MarkusQ
Nor did I claim that they did. Nice strawman though.
Can you point me to someone that has managed to reproduce the Army's claimed failure mode? Because otherwise harping on the fact that the independent tests only cast doubt on parts of the Army's test is rather silly. As General Downing said:
If someone makes a claim, someone else tests it and finds it to be suspect, does it really make sense to complain "Oh, but you didn't test the rest of their claims"?
I don't know where in the heck that came from. My point was that the initial Army report has been disputed. To make such a point, it is typical to provide a link to someone raising disputed points, not just repeating the original claims as if they were undisputed. It has nothing to do with sources I approve of or disapprove of, and everything to do with pointing out where I got the information that there was a dispute in the first place.
What in the heck is this supposed to mean? You are trying to sway people into believing that you don't care about a debate "either way" in your response to my post pointing out that the debate exists, but you don't think you can sway them into believing in your indifference because politics (which hasn't even been mentioned prior to your post) is generally more important than intellectual honesty?
Say what?
--MarkusQ
Independent tests do not support the army's conclusions. Since there is already some question about the validity of the army's tests (e.g. the designer of the vest that "won" in the army's test says that dragon skin is actually better, the person who conducted the army tests left to work for a dragon skin competitor, etc.) I don't think just repeating the army's conclusions (or quoting the Washington Compost as doing so) really proves anything.
--MarkusQ
Google is your friend. But then, I suppose, so am I.
--MarkusQ
Where, in the link you cited, does it say anything about the UN being certain that Iran has a weapons program? All I see are sanctions for their refusal to halt activities which, as the Iranian delegate points out, they are perfectly entitled to engage in under the non-proliferation treaty.
What, other countries are trying to feed bogus "intelligence" to the UN too? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked.
--MarkusQ
Perhaps. They aren't all that satisfied with the bogus "intelligence" the US has been feeding them, that's for sure.
If I had to guess, the Iranian's claim to have a viable space program and the US claim that the Iranians have a viable weapons program are both about as reliable as the previous claims about Iraq and the smoking guns that were going to be mushroom clouds. I suppose I'm slightly more skeptical of the weapons programs claims, if only because Dick "never right about anything" Cheney has weighed in in support of the story.
--MarkusQ
If you haven't had this tendency whacked out of you be daily life you need to get out more, or do something other than stare at a blank wall while you're in.
Seriously. A month of almost any sort of social activity (or twenty minutes in a few bars I know of) should fix it. As should a few year's experience debugging other people's code, working in retail, or even watching nature shows on TV ("Wasps do what?!? That's seriously messed up dude!").
Heck, just open an e-mail account.
If you have a tendency to trust things just because they seem genuine you are in deep, deep trouble. And that fact hasn't changed for millions of years.
--MarkusQ
The two candidates you mentioned are presently experiencing technical difficulties that make it difficult to run story about their position on issues such as stem cell research, network neutrality, etc. With a very few exceptions (McCain support escalating the war in Iraq even more than Bush, Clinton is opposed to flag burning) neither of them seem able to come up with a single clear and consistent position on an issue.
In general Clinton can't seem to take a stand on either side of an issue, and McCain can't seem to refrain from taking a stand on both.
Maybe the best solution would be to run a story on their positions ("Clinton and McCain collectively support and oppose stem cell research, a guest worker program, the great wall of Arizona, soft money, torture, and a prohibition on the gratuitous use of the word 'Belgium' in video games") and them let them wait until their focus groups have decided what they should think before getting into which of them took which position.
--MarkusQ
That's certainly plausible, but it doesn't explain why we only hit oil-rich countries. North Korea could have been just as costly, and easier to justify.
Sadly, I'd have to admit that this is also plausible. But it still doesn't explain why Iraq.
This one just doesn't hold water. I can't think of a single instance where any nation in history went back to fix their mistakes without some other, stronger motive.
Ah, but they didn't want to get it, they wanted to control it. And they didn't think the war would cost nearly as much as it did. And finally, even if there were cost overruns, we, the tax paying American public, our sons and daughters in the national guard, and the Iraqi's are the ones paying the costs. And note that the cost overruns both feed directly into your other points (war profiteering and PWIFs wanting to hear the last trumpet sound.
In other words, although much of what you said is plausible, none of it argues against the reason we chose Iraq to invade being the oil.
--MarkusQ
The problem isn't coming up with a way to do it, it's getting people to buy into it. There are lots of ways to cut down on our use of fossil fuels (nuclear, space-based solar, etc.) and there are lots of ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere (though most if not all of the best ones involve plants and sunlight). But we have a huge culture/industry built around the notion of burning fossil fuels and that isn't going away any time soon. Given that they are willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to finesse access to a small fraction of the worlds fossil fuels, a $25 million dollar prize (heck even if they made it $25 billion) isn't going to matter squat. --MarkusQ P.S. And if you want to argue that the war isn't about oil, you need to start by coming up with a non-discredited alternative explanation and at least sketch out why it doesn't apply to any of the more obvious targets who aren't sitting on a bunch of oil.
Great. Just what we need--yet another way to shuffle content around.
Am I the only one that things the real bottle neck is finding the time to read and think about all this information--and that yet another layer of goo, no matter how scriptastic, isn't really going to address the fundamental problem of information overload?
--MarkusQ
An even greater effect should come about from orbital mechanics; most collisions should result in most of the material dropping into a lower or more elliptical orbit (to eventially burn up), some of it being ejected altogether, and a diminishing fraction of it remaining in LEO.
--MarkusQ
Agreed. My main motivation for backing space-based deployment is to move industry off-earth. And if you look at what has happened throughout history, industry goes to where the energy and raw materials are located.
Not quite. The main hazard will be un-trained (or at least less trained) people maintaining power generating equipment. While the per incident risks are lower the number of incidents will be much higher. I'd expect it to follow the same basic curve as transportation, with air travel being much safer than driving even though airplane crashes are much more dramatic than car crashes.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt at 320 MW/m^2.
Ditto, by saying thirty percent. The net effect of both of these would be that you'd need to cover an area three times as large as the greater LA metro area, instead of equal to it.
I'm not sure what you're addressing here; I was talking about how much space the solar panels themselves would take up, not about the production of them.
Recycling is great, and a good way to address the problem of waste. Any idea how many cycles you can go?
I actually did a little digging on my own and am willing to accept that conclusion. I might take you up on the conference call invitation, but I'm in the middle of an international move and so it may not make sense to even try.
--MarkusQ
The operational safety and environmental impact of solar needs to be considered though. A typical nuclear reactor generates in the 1000MW range, and even at 30% efficiency (higher than we're likely to get to any time soon) and absolutely no cloud cover you are looking at something like 320*0.3 W/m^2 = 100W/m^2, so and equivalent solar plant is going to occupy 1000,000,000 W / (100 W/m^2) = 10,000,000 m^2, or ten million square meters just for the collectors. If you are going to replace all of the existing capacity with solar you will need roughly a thousand of these (1,000,000 MW total US capacity / 1000 MW per plant), or ten billion m^2 of collectors.
To put it in perspective, you are talking about an roughly the size of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. There are going to be safety and environmental consequences of operating anything this large, no matter how you slice it. Clearly there will be industrial accidents on a regular basis if you run it as a single monolithic structure (even if just moving people and materials around), and it gets worse (though harder to track) if you split it up into lots of little facilities (say, one on every roof top).
Assuming the active surfaces weighs 1 Kg/m^2 (an underestimate) and last on average 50 years (an over estimate) you will still have 20,000 metric tons of toxic waste a year (not counting manufacturing waste to deal with). While still much better than fossil fuels (which produce that much in well under a day) it needs to be considered.
--MarkusQ
P.S. I think we both agree on the gals here, and the quibbles are about means. My preferred solar power scenario is to put it (and much of our industry) out in space. But even your "solar panels everywhere" scenario is better than what we have now.
Just out of curiosity, and assuming of course that everything he wrote is true, what exactly would that better case be? "Your honor, he told the truth about events that he personally witnessed, and in a public forum to boot!"? Or maybe "He directed more traffic to our web site and potentially posted our Google page rank, with malice aforethought!"?
--MarkusQ
I've heard this offered as an explanation for why nuclear is so much less popular than fossil fuels. While the probabilistic number of people killed is much lower than the actual number being killed by fossil fuels right now the people killed by fossil fuels are mostly the poor (e.g. black lung), foreigners (e.g. oil wars) and elderly (e.g. premature death due to pollution) whereas a nuclear accident might kill the people who are actually using the power.
Get some perspective here. Not only are fossil fuels more deadly in the short run, but they are far, far more dangerous in the long run. Look at Venus. At the north pole, in the dead of winter, it's a balmy 750 degrees. That's what runaway greenhouse looks like. If you were forced and gunpoint to move into either the "dead zone" around one of your worst-case nuclear scare stories, or a planet sized pizza oven, which would you choose?
This is the standard "conflate chemical toxicity with radiation danger" shell game. But it is a shell game. Our bodies do not deal well with any heavy metal in soluble form. It doesn't matter where they come from or (to a large extent) what they are. The actinoids (including plutonium and uranium) are chemically indistinguishable. Our bodies simply can't tell them apart, and there is absolutely no difference in our ability to tolerate them.
The whole leaving the Earth to the roaches nonsense is right out of the oil industry's anti-nuclear energy playbook, 1955-1975 editions, when they actively encouraged this meme despite the fact that it has no basis in fact. And, in case you wonder, radiation won't make the bugs big, and it won't make them glow, either.
I find this claim hard to believe. Can you source it? And does it take into account the ecological consequences of producing and deploying the solar panels, and the risks associated with maintaining them?
--MarkusQ
I seem to have missed the ones where lots of people die. In the first dozen, no one dies at all; in the whole list we have well under a hundred dead (the bulk, as you note, in Chornobyl), which compares very favorably to the number killed in fossil fuel power generation. If you want, we can include the "statistically increased chance of death in the general population" numbers too, but they will make fossil fuels look even worse even if you just take into account the emphysema, lung cancer, and asthma figures and ignore things like black lung deaths of coal miners, oil drilling accidents, and the hundreds of thousands killed in wars over oil.
In addition, I stand by my earlier statement: you are attempting to extrapolate from a very small data set (the few cases with any actual deaths and not just rules violations) and this isn't a valid way to reason.
If it was, as you admit, killed by the courts than the proximal cause is lawyers, not engineers. As I said before, it was killed by politics. The whole engineering and time scale argument misses the point.
Nor have we any need to. This goes back to the fundamental illogic of the whole waste disposal argument. Things with a long half life are, by definition, more stable and thus less dangerous. And because of the way in which chain reactions (including sub-critical reactions) work, spread out is safer than concentrated (sometimes much safer). But to hear most anti-nuclear people talk, the goal is to confine the wastes in a small space, and keep them there for a very long time because we are worrying about the elements with the long half lives.
They are, in short, about as logical as the global warming deniers, and for good reason: in many cases they get their talking points from the same sort of fossil fuel industry funded "scientists." I know that you are aware of this problem when it comes to global warming.
Nuts. By pushing the time frame out to "permanent" and "geological time" you are just flat out misrepresenting the actual issues.
Of course I would. But not to the exclusion of nuclear. And in any case, I wouldn't get too smug about the prospects for solar. If it is ever perceived as a serious threat to fossil fuels, it will get the smear and FUD treatment too.
--MarkusQ