In California, the problem is that deregulation has TOTALLY fucked up the power industry. Where it's more lucrative to "sell" power out of state, claim insufficient capacity, then import power (which isn't so heavily price-fixed) and mark it up horrendously and at just barely-there availability.
The thing is, YOU were talking about economic damage, loss of land, social ramifications, etc of flat out losing a town/community from a nuclear accident.
My point is that nuclear power isn't the only way to leave people bereft of a town, and that similar problems, along with historical examples, exist with regards to fossil fuel as well.
Now I DO agree with you that Fukushima residents should probably be reimbursed for the full, pre-accident value of their homes and belongings, as well as compensation for the damage done to their lives.
What is the qualitative difference between a town that is abandoned due to nuclear fallout/waste and a town that's abandoned due to a coal mine fire underneath it?
No AmiMoJo, you were talking about losing whole towns.
How is something like the loss of the Fukushima Exclusion Zone or the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone QUALITATIVELY any different from what happened in Centralia, PA?
The problem with breeders and thorium reactors is that they are unproven on commercial scale. Every time anyone has attempted them, there have been many serious and expensive problems.
The main expense is trying to actually get anyone from the government to actually talk with you about them in the first place. Because the current political climate runs something like this:
NRCGuy: Hi! What can I do for you! You: Hi! I'd like to talk about building a small-scale Thorium reactor for research purposes. NRCGuy: *Holds hand out, expecting money* *After you pay the fee.* NRCGuy: Okay! Thanks! Your time is up! *Holds hand out, expecting more money.*
You DO understand that how long something is radioactive for is inversely proportional to how radioactive it is.
Stuff that's really, seriously virulently radioactive? The stuff is really REALLY "hot" and decays down quickly.
The stuff that takes tens or hundreds of thousands of years to cook down? You could bask in it pretty much every day and your yearly exposure levels would barely blip up.
Part of the reason many of these wastes are in storage is they're CHEMICALLY reactive or are dangerous as a biological contaminant. (You can actually hold a chunk of plutonium. But if you start accumulating it in your body, you have a problem.)
Sure. And it's being stored away in casks, rather than being reprocessed.because of silly laws by people who think that somebody's going to make bombs out of it. Also, it's being stored away in casks, rather than being used in reactor types that could cook it down into a form of waste that's far less long-lived. Also, it's being stored away in casks, rather than the byproducts being dumped into the environment at large the way fossil fuel power production does.
So how cheap would fossil fuel-based power be if you had to treat the waste the way you do nuclear waste?
1: Put off branding until their have their actual products well defined. 2: Stop shoving their nose so far up Google's nether-sphicter. They want their OWN products, not Google also-rans. 3: Dump the fucking SJW culture. It's toxic and it's negatively impacting your products by making your development every bit as psychotic and MPD as it is. 4: Hire someone who ACTUALLY knows something about branding. Whoever's fourth cousin came up with the shit you have there needs to never be allowed near anything even RESEMBLING product branding ever again...
Fuck having to try and decipher somebody's accent and dialect on a crappy line from a crappy cell phone someplace in a giant wind tunnel with loads of background noise.
More landmass sure. But where's most of the population concentrated in Canada?
The majority of Canada's population is concentrated in the areas close to the Canadaâ"US border. Its four largest provinces by area (Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta) are also its most populous; together they account for 86% of the country's population.
So yeah, you still don't have the population dispersion problems the US does.
And I think you and I at least SORT OF agree here. Yes, the issue with American telcos isn't tech and only indirectly infrastructure. The main problem is their business decisions.
Again, I'm not arguing technical superiority here.
I'm simply saying, in a huge portion of the US, cable is simply delivering a superior (from the customer's standpoint) product at a superior price point.
And I agree, it's hard to make shareholders and other investors see anything beyond their next dividend check or stock price jump. Something's been lost in the age of "Business At The Speed Of Internet". Planning for the future. Now it's just, maximize short term profits. PERIOD.
Basically American Telcos, while the government was still bribing them to increase internet speeds, chose to minimize their investment in infrastructure to support future generations of technology. And, considering the size of the American telco infrastructure, it's kind of understandable. That's a LOT of area to cover, and it's expensive as fuck.
Still, they took the money, and then a bunch of execs got big fat bonuses.
Now, they still have the same shitty, old, worn out infrastructure, it's just a decade or so later.
Meanwhile, after a round of consolidation and infrastructure improvements, the US cablecos (that survived) are sitting on networks with a lot of "headroom" available as the DOCSIS standard advances.
Now, do they reach EVERYONE? No.
But, given their druthers, the telcos wouldn't be able to either. Right now they have a huge copper infrastructure that's been built up over the last century-plus. So they can essentially reach everyone, even if the speeds are atrociously low.
But they want to ditch the copper infrastructure. Meaning they're back to square one, and they won't be able to service everyone with their upcoming high-tier service levels.
And, generally, other countries don't generally have the sheer landmass that the US does. That's why the push for CO consolidation wasn't felt as greatly as it was here. This happenstance was lucky in that it left most of these countries as prime targets for truly high speed DSL implementation.
You're ignoring the original point that, in general, the cablecos are delivering more of what people want and doing better than the telcos.
The arguments against the cableco model are primarily technical trivialities that generally make zero real difference to those actually using the technology.
Granted, YES, there ARE situations where local loops are so badly oversold by cablecos that their performance degrades. But that isn't the general use case.
Now, ARE there areas where the telcos are getting it right? Sure. But, in general, they're more limited by their technology and current transmission medium than the cable companies are.
So, if an end user is given the choice between a 3/.5 Mbit connection with a 200 gig data cap or a 50/5 connection with a TB data cap, and both are $60/month, what are most people going to choose? How many people are REALISTICALLY going to go "Well, the DSL setup is a technically superior style of connection! I'm gonna get me some of that!"
So, before you start accusing someone of "blind" defense, I suggest you remove your own blinkers buddy boy.
Who gives a shit how congested it is if you're getting 5.0/0.5 on twisted pair DSL and 250/20 on coax?
DSL: Oh! Coax is so congested! Boo hoo! It'll only take me a day and a half to download this! Cable: Oh crap! I'm so congested! It's going to take me 20 minutes to download this!
And the politicoes are all stumped as to why people are angry at them and screaming for real change, to the point where people will actually vote for an asshat like Trump...
Slashdot Mirror
Fully expecting the HAARP project to get blown up by person or persons unknown...
That's what this is.
"Just don't use as much."
Now, sure, that works...up to a point.
In California, the problem is that deregulation has TOTALLY fucked up the power industry. Where it's more lucrative to "sell" power out of state, claim insufficient capacity, then import power (which isn't so heavily price-fixed) and mark it up horrendously and at just barely-there availability.
They know, well, that people don't want auto-play video with sound.
History has shown that users will block such things with a vengeance or walk away from a service that won't stop this sort of nasty behavior.
Yet FACEBOOK is going to try it again. Like it wasn't fucking obnoxious and undesirably the first umpty-fuckin-bajillion times it was tried.
But hey. Go ahead! Make your platform ever more irrelevant! All in the name of chasing ad dollars!
You fucking twits...
The thing is, YOU were talking about economic damage, loss of land, social ramifications, etc of flat out losing a town/community from a nuclear accident.
My point is that nuclear power isn't the only way to leave people bereft of a town, and that similar problems, along with historical examples, exist with regards to fossil fuel as well.
Now I DO agree with you that Fukushima residents should probably be reimbursed for the full, pre-accident value of their homes and belongings, as well as compensation for the damage done to their lives.
Basic English here.
What is the qualitative difference between a town that is abandoned due to nuclear fallout/waste and a town that's abandoned due to a coal mine fire underneath it?
No AmiMoJo, you were talking about losing whole towns.
How is something like the loss of the Fukushima Exclusion Zone or the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone QUALITATIVELY any different from what happened in Centralia, PA?
However there's even MORE Thorium out there.
And mining thorium would allow places like the US to restart their rare earths mining, and stop depending on China.
No, actually a breeder reactor is a reactor that produces more fissile material than it consumes.
The main expense is trying to actually get anyone from the government to actually talk with you about them in the first place. Because the current political climate runs something like this:
NRCGuy: Hi! What can I do for you!
You: Hi! I'd like to talk about building a small-scale Thorium reactor for research purposes.
NRCGuy: *Holds hand out, expecting money*
*After you pay the fee.*
NRCGuy: Okay! Thanks! Your time is up! *Holds hand out, expecting more money.*
Uhm, Actually, one of the byproducts in a Thorium LFTR design is P-238 (which is used in "nuclear batteries").
Oh. No. The Japanese DID understand.
The engineers had recommended bolstering the wall height to deal with larger waves.
TEPCO just stuffed their fingers in their ears and cheaped out.
You DO understand that how long something is radioactive for is inversely proportional to how radioactive it is.
Stuff that's really, seriously virulently radioactive? The stuff is really REALLY "hot" and decays down quickly.
The stuff that takes tens or hundreds of thousands of years to cook down? You could bask in it pretty much every day and your yearly exposure levels would barely blip up.
Part of the reason many of these wastes are in storage is they're CHEMICALLY reactive or are dangerous as a biological contaminant. (You can actually hold a chunk of plutonium. But if you start accumulating it in your body, you have a problem.)
Kinda like the mine fire in Centralia, PA right?
A mine fire that's been burning roughly 53 years and could burn at least another 250.
Meanwhile, the byproducts of that fire are going up into the atmosphere with zero filtration.
Town was evacuated and claimed via Eminent Domain. Nobody's going back there any time in the foreseeable future.
So stop pretending that this is a problem unique to nuclear power.
Sure. And it's being stored away in casks, rather than being reprocessed.because of silly laws by people who think that somebody's going to make bombs out of it.
Also, it's being stored away in casks, rather than being used in reactor types that could cook it down into a form of waste that's far less long-lived.
Also, it's being stored away in casks, rather than the byproducts being dumped into the environment at large the way fossil fuel power production does.
So how cheap would fossil fuel-based power be if you had to treat the waste the way you do nuclear waste?
Then Mozilla, as a company, needs to fucking die.
1: Put off branding until their have their actual products well defined.
2: Stop shoving their nose so far up Google's nether-sphicter. They want their OWN products, not Google also-rans.
3: Dump the fucking SJW culture. It's toxic and it's negatively impacting your products by making your development every bit as psychotic and MPD as it is.
4: Hire someone who ACTUALLY knows something about branding. Whoever's fourth cousin came up with the shit you have there needs to never be allowed near anything even RESEMBLING product branding ever again...
Basically Wikileaks has nobody there who is competent enough to actually implement a security framework for the site.
So, as a result, it basically becomes a dumping ground for all this crap.
Thus, when examples are pointed out to them, all they can do is nix the examples.
Have you ever HEARD some people on the phone?
I'd rather have a nice, simple text message.
Fuck having to try and decipher somebody's accent and dialect on a crappy line from a crappy cell phone someplace in a giant wind tunnel with loads of background noise.
More landmass sure. But where's most of the population concentrated in Canada?
I didn't say cable was universally superior to DSL.
I essentially said that, in the US, whether it's technologically superior or not, from a customer standpoint, cable is the superior product.
But hey, keep trying to put words in my mouth...
Basically American Telcos, while the government was still bribing them to increase internet speeds, chose to minimize their investment in infrastructure to support future generations of technology. And, considering the size of the American telco infrastructure, it's kind of understandable. That's a LOT of area to cover, and it's expensive as fuck.
Still, they took the money, and then a bunch of execs got big fat bonuses.
Now, they still have the same shitty, old, worn out infrastructure, it's just a decade or so later.
Meanwhile, after a round of consolidation and infrastructure improvements, the US cablecos (that survived) are sitting on networks with a lot of "headroom" available as the DOCSIS standard advances.
Now, do they reach EVERYONE? No.
But, given their druthers, the telcos wouldn't be able to either. Right now they have a huge copper infrastructure that's been built up over the last century-plus. So they can essentially reach everyone, even if the speeds are atrociously low.
But they want to ditch the copper infrastructure. Meaning they're back to square one, and they won't be able to service everyone with their upcoming high-tier service levels.
And, generally, other countries don't generally have the sheer landmass that the US does. That's why the push for CO consolidation wasn't felt as greatly as it was here. This happenstance was lucky in that it left most of these countries as prime targets for truly high speed DSL implementation.
You're ignoring the original point that, in general, the cablecos are delivering more of what people want and doing better than the telcos.
The arguments against the cableco model are primarily technical trivialities that generally make zero real difference to those actually using the technology.
Granted, YES, there ARE situations where local loops are so badly oversold by cablecos that their performance degrades. But that isn't the general use case.
Now, ARE there areas where the telcos are getting it right? Sure. But, in general, they're more limited by their technology and current transmission medium than the cable companies are.
So, if an end user is given the choice between a 3/.5 Mbit connection with a 200 gig data cap or a 50/5 connection with a TB data cap, and both are $60/month, what are most people going to choose? How many people are REALISTICALLY going to go "Well, the DSL setup is a technically superior style of connection! I'm gonna get me some of that!"
So, before you start accusing someone of "blind" defense, I suggest you remove your own blinkers buddy boy.
Who gives a shit how congested it is if you're getting 5.0/0.5 on twisted pair DSL and 250/20 on coax?
DSL: Oh! Coax is so congested! Boo hoo! It'll only take me a day and a half to download this!
Cable: Oh crap! I'm so congested! It's going to take me 20 minutes to download this!
But I consider that rape.
And the politicoes are all stumped as to why people are angry at them and screaming for real change, to the point where people will actually vote for an asshat like Trump...