Yes, I know this might come as a shocker to many but there are people, companies, managers and even governments (not necessarily the German one though) that do not see a human as a pure cost factor, comparable to a machine on the assembly line or the rent for the office.
A human should be treated as such and surprisingly will perform quite well if done so. What do you expect from someone who is monitored 24/7 (or at least 8+/5), whose work time is recorded by the second? Sure, that might work for really basic jobs, like cleaning the roads or the like. But for anything a little more demanding or even remotely creative (yes, even working in a lousy call centre requires some creativity at times) this will result in frustration and delivery of the minimal required performance instead of the maximum possible.
Stop to treat your employees like animals in a barn and you might notice a surprise: productivity goes up!
If someone (including me) seriously thought that Obama might really bring any kind of change to the way the U.S. is governed - they should stop to dream today. At least that's what I'm doing. Especially after he received the Nobel Peace Prize I was really hoping that he would try to live up to the enormous expectations. He didn't. He's just another president, doing just the same all the previous presidents did - and definitely not bringing any real change.
It seems that it doesn't really matter who is president. One way or the other they all fuck it up.
Now I just hope that the Nobel Peace Committee has the balls to hand out the next one to Wikileaks to make up for some of the damage they did by awarding it to Obama.
Absolutely unimportant as long as you leave out the costs for insurance and waste handling - those are the ones that drive up the costs by a multitude.
No sane insurance company on this planet will insure a nuclear power plant, no matter if it's fired by uranium, thorium or godknowswhat - simply because the risks are too high. It's always the government (and therefore the taxpayer) that has to pay if something goes wrong. And history teaches us that things will go wrong at some point in time. The same applies to the waste handling. It might be just small amounts of waste - but they are dangerous and remain dangerous for an extremely long period of time. The U.S. exists for a little more than 200 years - yet we are dealing with waste that remains a serious threat for thousands of years. No one knows what will happen within this period of time and yet everyone is just assuming that by some miracle a solution will be found or at least the waste is safely stored for that time span. That's pretty ridiculous, especially when you consider that the same government that is encouraging the usage of nuclear power plants on the other hand is making a hell of a fuss about some 10 year old kid taking a bottle of orange juice on a plane.
Just because the follow-up costs of nuclear energy are consequently ignored in those calculations it has been so cheap so far. While the costs of the solar panels, installation, etc. is to be fully covered by the one installing it, the nuclear waste is handled by the government and so is the insurance.
Calculate the full costs, including recycling, insurance and the like and there is hardly any power source that's more expensive than nuclear energy.
It doesn't really matter what the bible means to me and how I see it. It matters though what it means to the people that I address. They value it and are usually the ones to use it as a universal instrument against and for anything. So it only matters that they believe in it.
It works in countless other countries. Why shouldn't it work in the U.S.?
Am I the only one that finds that financial implications shouldn't really matter when health and life are in danger?
You guys burn billions on weird wars because some thousand people died in a terrorist attack but you don't want to spend a few hundred million to make sure that 1/6 of your population doesn't die of everyday diseases?
That sounds pretty strange to me to put it polite.
if the oh so friendly Republicans and some rather conservative Democrats would have agreed to it. The initial suggestion included a public insurance but got shot down.
gives you the right to have roads to walk/drive on or fire fighters to help you when your house is burning? Doubt that. So why are those 2 points more valid and important than a healthy population?
Gladly it's "shoved up your ass" because you are too cheap to help those that need it by yourself.
I talk as it pleases me. The last time I checked I was living in a free country.
I'm sure it bugs the so-called Christians if they get slapped by their own holy book - and I'm fine with that. I do not really need to find any passage because the whole book (well, at least the new testament, which should be the more important part for Christians) is filled with it and there is barely any chapter without said reference.
I'm not really interested in yet another person's interpretation of a centuries old book that has been altered itself countless times depending on who ordered to translate it at a given time despite the original version not even being available anymore. I'm sure you can interpret pretty much anything you like into it if you just bend the words enough.
My point was that especially those die-hard-ultra-conservative "Christians" (in parentheses because I think that they are less of a Christian than I am) act less like Christ than they claim that they do. I fail to memorize a single chapter where Jesus told his followers to check their wallets before deciding wether to help someone in need or not, no matter if the person suffers because of their own fault or not. Quite the opposite!
Do you call public roads, tax paid fire fighters and general taxes already Socialism? This bill is as much Socialism as all the other public services are.
Socialism in the usual public understanding is something different than social services provided by most countries in the western world, even when the Americans tend to call pretty much every country but their own to be a socialist country. Socialism and Communism are terms for societies that are pretty much tainted by what happened during the last century. They have not much to do with the original idea behind both of them though. In theory at least Socialism doesn't say much about the government at all. It could be a dictatorship (like all the examples in the last century were) or it could be as well a western democracy. It's pretty much undefined. Socialism is first and foremost a form of economy, less a governmental form. The same to some extend applies to Communism. Both (the latter more) tend to encourage dictatorships though, which is the real problem.
I suggest to stop to think of every social aspect to be some kind of Socialism or the way to it because of the said implications and prejudice. If you are a Republican on the other hand and just want to spread fear and the like to win the next election then it's of course the way to go! It works very well in the U.S. because people have some kind of primal reflex as soon as the terms "Socialism" or "Communism" are used.
That stuff is usually called "universal" health care. So it means it doesn't matter if or what you work and how much.
Depending on which country you look at you sometimes get some kind of payment deduction when you are on sick leave and not the full 100%, differs quite a bit though.
that's why the Republicans, especially the Tea Party nutters, are still allowed to roam free.
Whoever is against a universal health care is the real fascist here. The Constitution is more than 200 years old, from a time when something like health care was unthinkable and usually the equivalent to a bottle of whiskey and a blunt hammer. Being conservative is a good thing at times. But sometimes you need to accept that times change and that not everyone is running around with a colt on his hip anymore and doing justice by simply shooting the opponent.
I know that you Americans have trouble to see that social != communism (or whatever you think communism is).
"God's own country" - my ass! Did any of the die-hard christians over there ever read the bible (and understood it)? Then no one would even think a split second about universal health care anymore and simply do it because that's the core of all the stuff in that ancient book. I'm no christian at all but that's pretty much the only good thing in this book: taking care for each other, without looking at the bank account every time.
Damn you cheap bastards! One day it'll bite your butt to be so selfish.
If you really are into Ultima-like gameplay then have a look at: http://www.tibia.com/ It looks really old compared to WoW & Co. but the gameplay is amazing and you have all you ask for in it: housing, thieving, looting - everything is there!
I play Tibia since 1998 (with interruptions) and always return, just started again a few weeks ago. I've played many other mmorpgs and they are all fine and nice for a while but grow boring quickly because it's just no thrill involved. In Tibia you'll have plenty of thrill because you can actually lose something. It's probably the hardest mmorpg that you can find on the market, so be warned!
If you need some assistance: drop me a message and I'll let you know who to contact to get started.
There is no need for more attacks, the authorities do a splendid job at keeping their citizens frightened and in fear. Probably just a question of time until they start bigger raids and maybe even start to execute people to be sure that those cannot cause any harm.
What has the world come to? One bigger terrorist attack and the U.S. bombs the shit out of 2 countries. Some more unsuccessful tries and several countries go mental and start to treat everyone like a possible mass murderer. I guess I get banned from several countries now for posting subversive messages and being a possible threat as well.
Time to relocate to a lonely island, a long forgotten cave on Antarctica or into a tend in the desert. That sounds almost comfortable compared to what we experience here at the moment.
(Oh for sarcastically disabled people and authorities: that was sarcasm, all of it. Gotta make sure to add that to every post on the net now. You never know who's just waiting with a gun next to your door...)
I didn't speak about all iPhone users and that Apple wouldn't sell any after switching to Bing. I just said that they would lose some customers (and I don't see them gaining any by that move).
So no matter if there are computer illiterates among the masses of iPhone users (and I'm sure there are) - Apple would lose.
A good chunk of the iPhone market share stems from customers that are fed up with Windows Mobile and similar crap. I doubt that those would be too happy to be driven back into the hell hole they've just escaped.
Jobs is clever enough not to risk that. He might be tempted but he's not an idiot.
After all this is a science school, isn't it? So the boy needs counseling for doing what the very purpose the school got built for?
Are there any sane people left over there or has everyone turned manic and totally crazy already? I would really like to visit the U.S. one day but I'm dead scared, not of terrorists but to get snatched by some officials because I wear the wrong colored t-shirt or the like.
Globally Bing is turning the other direction. Microsoft was always a bit stronger in the U.S., so nothing too exciting here.
And of course it went up in December when you see all the Windows 7 boxes that got sold before Christmas. They all default to Bing until the user changes it to something sane, which usually takes a bit. Wait for the January/February numbers and you'll probably see a nice dent in that curve again.
That's exactly what I meant: you cannot prevent accidents like this. Next time we might be a bit less lucky and the thing really melts down.
After all those reactors are constructed and built by humans. Humans make mistakes. Mistakes in those cases can be disastrous.
Therefore we should do everything we can to NOT build those things if there are safer and cleaner alternatives available. If they are not available then we need to invest to make them available.
That's all fine and interesting. But why do we limit ourselves at all? Why don't we go for something that has no limit - like the sun? That's more energy than we can every need. We just need to learn how to harvest it properly and that's all.
Just to sum it up (quoting is a bit to time consuming 1 minute before I want to go to bed):
Nuclear power plants are run by companies and that's (sadly) unlikely to change anytime soon. Therefore the risk depends on the greediness of the operator, on top of the standard risk. Btw: the Harrisburg type reactor is still running.
I refuse to believe that any nuclear power plant can be shut down in 2-5 sec. no matter how damaged it is. I'm sure that if the air plane hits the right part of the building there will be no shut down. I'm rather pessimistic and wrong than optimistic and wrong here.
The problem with old and new remains the same. Even if you replace all old power plants in an instant (which costs shit load of money, but hey) they'll be old in 20 or latest 30 years, at least the concrete will be. Do you want to keep replacing your power plants every 20 years? That renders the whole "it's cheap" argument useless.
I'm actually glad that Germany is finally shutting down it's nuclear power program. It has no future anyway. Uranium is as much renewable as oil is. It's just madness to invest a lot of money in a technology whose end is already visible. I already posted it somewhere else: depending on who is guessing we have 50 (Greenpeace) to 200 (lobbyists) years of Uranium supplies left, given the current consumption holds. So if we build power plants like no tomorrow we'll run out of fuel in a couple of years. That doesn't make any sense at all. It's an old technology without future, get over it!
And finally regarding the safety of water damns. Of course you can build everything in a way that it endangers people. Besides the fact that in Norway we have less than 5 mio. people in total, so it's virtually impossible to kill more than a handful when a damn breaks, it should be planned properly and created in places where it doesn't harm people. Additionally Norway (and many other European countries) are investing more and more (still not enough in my opinion) to make use of all kinds of alternative options to generate energy (wind, solar, etc.) and, that's the most important part, they plan to connect their grids properly so that volatile means of electricity generation (e.g. wind) can be compensated by other means. One of the next steps (already in progress) are offshore wind parks.
That sounds pretty safe to me. And at the end it will be cheaper, a lot cheaper than nuclear power plants.
Why is everyone suspecting me to be French? And what does it have to do with the topic?
After all the French are the ones that are covering their whole country with nuclear power plants. So if at all I would expect a French to speak for those and not against.
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Yes, I know this might come as a shocker to many but there are people, companies, managers and even governments (not necessarily the German one though) that do not see a human as a pure cost factor, comparable to a machine on the assembly line or the rent for the office.
A human should be treated as such and surprisingly will perform quite well if done so. What do you expect from someone who is monitored 24/7 (or at least 8+/5), whose work time is recorded by the second? Sure, that might work for really basic jobs, like cleaning the roads or the like. But for anything a little more demanding or even remotely creative (yes, even working in a lousy call centre requires some creativity at times) this will result in frustration and delivery of the minimal required performance instead of the maximum possible.
Stop to treat your employees like animals in a barn and you might notice a surprise: productivity goes up!
If someone (including me) seriously thought that Obama might really bring any kind of change to the way the U.S. is governed - they should stop to dream today. At least that's what I'm doing.
Especially after he received the Nobel Peace Prize I was really hoping that he would try to live up to the enormous expectations. He didn't. He's just another president, doing just the same all the previous presidents did - and definitely not bringing any real change.
It seems that it doesn't really matter who is president. One way or the other they all fuck it up.
Now I just hope that the Nobel Peace Committee has the balls to hand out the next one to Wikileaks to make up for some of the damage they did by awarding it to Obama.
Absolutely unimportant as long as you leave out the costs for insurance and waste handling - those are the ones that drive up the costs by a multitude.
No sane insurance company on this planet will insure a nuclear power plant, no matter if it's fired by uranium, thorium or godknowswhat - simply because the risks are too high. It's always the government (and therefore the taxpayer) that has to pay if something goes wrong. And history teaches us that things will go wrong at some point in time.
The same applies to the waste handling. It might be just small amounts of waste - but they are dangerous and remain dangerous for an extremely long period of time. The U.S. exists for a little more than 200 years - yet we are dealing with waste that remains a serious threat for thousands of years. No one knows what will happen within this period of time and yet everyone is just assuming that by some miracle a solution will be found or at least the waste is safely stored for that time span.
That's pretty ridiculous, especially when you consider that the same government that is encouraging the usage of nuclear power plants on the other hand is making a hell of a fuss about some 10 year old kid taking a bottle of orange juice on a plane.
Just because the follow-up costs of nuclear energy are consequently ignored in those calculations it has been so cheap so far. While the costs of the solar panels, installation, etc. is to be fully covered by the one installing it, the nuclear waste is handled by the government and so is the insurance.
Calculate the full costs, including recycling, insurance and the like and there is hardly any power source that's more expensive than nuclear energy.
It doesn't really matter what the bible means to me and how I see it. It matters though what it means to the people that I address. They value it and are usually the ones to use it as a universal instrument against and for anything. So it only matters that they believe in it.
For me the bible is just an old fairy tale.
It works in countless other countries. Why shouldn't it work in the U.S.?
Am I the only one that finds that financial implications shouldn't really matter when health and life are in danger?
You guys burn billions on weird wars because some thousand people died in a terrorist attack but you don't want to spend a few hundred million to make sure that 1/6 of your population doesn't die of everyday diseases?
That sounds pretty strange to me to put it polite.
if the oh so friendly Republicans and some rather conservative Democrats would have agreed to it. The initial suggestion included a public insurance but got shot down.
gives you the right to have roads to walk/drive on or fire fighters to help you when your house is burning? Doubt that. So why are those 2 points more valid and important than a healthy population?
Gladly it's "shoved up your ass" because you are too cheap to help those that need it by yourself.
- roads ...
- fire fighters
- the army
I fail to see how any of those are more relevant than a healthy population and why making you pay for health care would be against the constitution.
I talk as it pleases me. The last time I checked I was living in a free country.
I'm sure it bugs the so-called Christians if they get slapped by their own holy book - and I'm fine with that. I do not really need to find any passage because the whole book (well, at least the new testament, which should be the more important part for Christians) is filled with it and there is barely any chapter without said reference.
I'm not really interested in yet another person's interpretation of a centuries old book that has been altered itself countless times depending on who ordered to translate it at a given time despite the original version not even being available anymore.
I'm sure you can interpret pretty much anything you like into it if you just bend the words enough.
My point was that especially those die-hard-ultra-conservative "Christians" (in parentheses because I think that they are less of a Christian than I am) act less like Christ than they claim that they do. I fail to memorize a single chapter where Jesus told his followers to check their wallets before deciding wether to help someone in need or not, no matter if the person suffers because of their own fault or not. Quite the opposite!
Do you call public roads, tax paid fire fighters and general taxes already Socialism?
This bill is as much Socialism as all the other public services are.
Socialism in the usual public understanding is something different than social services provided by most countries in the western world, even when the Americans tend to call pretty much every country but their own to be a socialist country.
Socialism and Communism are terms for societies that are pretty much tainted by what happened during the last century. They have not much to do with the original idea behind both of them though. In theory at least Socialism doesn't say much about the government at all. It could be a dictatorship (like all the examples in the last century were) or it could be as well a western democracy. It's pretty much undefined.
Socialism is first and foremost a form of economy, less a governmental form. The same to some extend applies to Communism. Both (the latter more) tend to encourage dictatorships though, which is the real problem.
I suggest to stop to think of every social aspect to be some kind of Socialism or the way to it because of the said implications and prejudice.
If you are a Republican on the other hand and just want to spread fear and the like to win the next election then it's of course the way to go! It works very well in the U.S. because people have some kind of primal reflex as soon as the terms "Socialism" or "Communism" are used.
That stuff is usually called "universal" health care. So it means it doesn't matter if or what you work and how much.
Depending on which country you look at you sometimes get some kind of payment deduction when you are on sick leave and not the full 100%, differs quite a bit though.
that's why the Republicans, especially the Tea Party nutters, are still allowed to roam free.
Whoever is against a universal health care is the real fascist here. The Constitution is more than 200 years old, from a time when something like health care was unthinkable and usually the equivalent to a bottle of whiskey and a blunt hammer.
Being conservative is a good thing at times. But sometimes you need to accept that times change and that not everyone is running around with a colt on his hip anymore and doing justice by simply shooting the opponent.
I know that you Americans have trouble to see that social != communism (or whatever you think communism is).
"God's own country" - my ass! Did any of the die-hard christians over there ever read the bible (and understood it)? Then no one would even think a split second about universal health care anymore and simply do it because that's the core of all the stuff in that ancient book. I'm no christian at all but that's pretty much the only good thing in this book: taking care for each other, without looking at the bank account every time.
Damn you cheap bastards! One day it'll bite your butt to be so selfish.
If you really are into Ultima-like gameplay then have a look at: http://www.tibia.com/
It looks really old compared to WoW & Co. but the gameplay is amazing and you have all you ask for in it: housing, thieving, looting - everything is there!
I play Tibia since 1998 (with interruptions) and always return, just started again a few weeks ago. I've played many other mmorpgs and they are all fine and nice for a while but grow boring quickly because it's just no thrill involved. In Tibia you'll have plenty of thrill because you can actually lose something. It's probably the hardest mmorpg that you can find on the market, so be warned!
If you need some assistance: drop me a message and I'll let you know who to contact to get started.
There is no need for more attacks, the authorities do a splendid job at keeping their citizens frightened and in fear.
Probably just a question of time until they start bigger raids and maybe even start to execute people to be sure that those cannot cause any harm.
What has the world come to? One bigger terrorist attack and the U.S. bombs the shit out of 2 countries. Some more unsuccessful tries and several countries go mental and start to treat everyone like a possible mass murderer. I guess I get banned from several countries now for posting subversive messages and being a possible threat as well.
Time to relocate to a lonely island, a long forgotten cave on Antarctica or into a tend in the desert. That sounds almost comfortable compared to what we experience here at the moment.
(Oh for sarcastically disabled people and authorities: that was sarcasm, all of it. Gotta make sure to add that to every post on the net now. You never know who's just waiting with a gun next to your door ...)
I didn't speak about all iPhone users and that Apple wouldn't sell any after switching to Bing. I just said that they would lose some customers (and I don't see them gaining any by that move).
So no matter if there are computer illiterates among the masses of iPhone users (and I'm sure there are) - Apple would lose.
A good chunk of the iPhone market share stems from customers that are fed up with Windows Mobile and similar crap. I doubt that those would be too happy to be driven back into the hell hole they've just escaped.
Jobs is clever enough not to risk that. He might be tempted but he's not an idiot.
After all this is a science school, isn't it? So the boy needs counseling for doing what the very purpose the school got built for?
Are there any sane people left over there or has everyone turned manic and totally crazy already? I would really like to visit the U.S. one day but I'm dead scared, not of terrorists but to get snatched by some officials because I wear the wrong colored t-shirt or the like.
Globally Bing is turning the other direction. Microsoft was always a bit stronger in the U.S., so nothing too exciting here.
And of course it went up in December when you see all the Windows 7 boxes that got sold before Christmas. They all default to Bing until the user changes it to something sane, which usually takes a bit. Wait for the January/February numbers and you'll probably see a nice dent in that curve again.
That's exactly what I meant: you cannot prevent accidents like this. Next time we might be a bit less lucky and the thing really melts down.
After all those reactors are constructed and built by humans. Humans make mistakes. Mistakes in those cases can be disastrous.
Therefore we should do everything we can to NOT build those things if there are safer and cleaner alternatives available. If they are not available then we need to invest to make them available.
If we would invest just a fraction of what we spend to subsidize nuclear power plants this issue would have probably been solved 20 years ago already.
But sadly there are no lobbyists advocating for such things in contrast to the hordes on the other side with the money bags filled with dollars.
That's all fine and interesting. But why do we limit ourselves at all? Why don't we go for something that has no limit - like the sun? That's more energy than we can every need. We just need to learn how to harvest it properly and that's all.
Just to sum it up (quoting is a bit to time consuming 1 minute before I want to go to bed):
Nuclear power plants are run by companies and that's (sadly) unlikely to change anytime soon. Therefore the risk depends on the greediness of the operator, on top of the standard risk.
Btw: the Harrisburg type reactor is still running.
I refuse to believe that any nuclear power plant can be shut down in 2-5 sec. no matter how damaged it is. I'm sure that if the air plane hits the right part of the building there will be no shut down. I'm rather pessimistic and wrong than optimistic and wrong here.
The problem with old and new remains the same. Even if you replace all old power plants in an instant (which costs shit load of money, but hey) they'll be old in 20 or latest 30 years, at least the concrete will be. Do you want to keep replacing your power plants every 20 years? That renders the whole "it's cheap" argument useless.
I'm actually glad that Germany is finally shutting down it's nuclear power program. It has no future anyway. Uranium is as much renewable as oil is. It's just madness to invest a lot of money in a technology whose end is already visible. I already posted it somewhere else: depending on who is guessing we have 50 (Greenpeace) to 200 (lobbyists) years of Uranium supplies left, given the current consumption holds. So if we build power plants like no tomorrow we'll run out of fuel in a couple of years. That doesn't make any sense at all. It's an old technology without future, get over it!
And finally regarding the safety of water damns. Of course you can build everything in a way that it endangers people. Besides the fact that in Norway we have less than 5 mio. people in total, so it's virtually impossible to kill more than a handful when a damn breaks, it should be planned properly and created in places where it doesn't harm people.
Additionally Norway (and many other European countries) are investing more and more (still not enough in my opinion) to make use of all kinds of alternative options to generate energy (wind, solar, etc.) and, that's the most important part, they plan to connect their grids properly so that volatile means of electricity generation (e.g. wind) can be compensated by other means.
One of the next steps (already in progress) are offshore wind parks.
That sounds pretty safe to me. And at the end it will be cheaper, a lot cheaper than nuclear power plants.
That could have ended much worth with a little less luck:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
That's 30 years ago but those types of nuclear power plants are still running.
Holy christ!
Why is everyone suspecting me to be French? And what does it have to do with the topic?
After all the French are the ones that are covering their whole country with nuclear power plants. So if at all I would expect a French to speak for those and not against.