The 'problem' with nuclear isn't the actual deaths but the potential deaths. Sure not every one is explosive, but when they are it ain't pretty. That's why they build the things so massively redundant. It simply can not fail. Period.
Now put something like that on a coastline prone to quakes and tsunamis. It's a bad risk to take yet was labeled 'safe' quite recently.
If humans were involved in the design, construction or operation, there will be things that fail.
Even if they built a sea wall high enough to stop the wave...it wouldn't have been enough because the land 'sank' 3 feet.
Wind and solar kill people in construction accidents.
Which applies to pretty much anything built...ever.
Wind and solar simply don't have any operational impacts on human life. Every other power source, coal, oil, nuclear, have deaths from operational and failure scenarios. Nuclear waste being stored for 100s of years is going to cause problems or at least has the potential to be a source for deaths.
Nuclear does kill less people. The difference is in specifically how, operational vs failure scenario.
Nuclear has basically zero operational fatalities, coal has numerous operations fatalities.
- Nuclear has no gas emissions etc
- coal gas emissions cause many deaths over time not even counting CO2. Mercury etc into the environment and overall health effects.
Coal has very very few failure fatalities, nuclear has fairly high potential failure fatalities.
- when a coal plant explodes, you can walk right in the next day. Deaths basically limited to workers on site at the time.
- nuclear obviously the failure mode has no 'good' solutions. Depending on the disaster it could be massive. It also renders 100s of sq miles uninhabitable for decades.
We tolerate coal because the deaths are widely dispersed and very much separate from the actual plant.
Nuclear disasters have been mitigated somewhat by the massive amounts of redundancy built into the plants. This is specifically done because of the potential risks of failure; i.e. it simply isn't an option.
Also not I'm not defending nuclear at all. I personally wish we could get off of it but the reality is renewable sources won't be ready for grid scale for another 50-100 years or so. We need to start that process now for that to be realized though.
Luckily, the passengers now understand that the "sit quietly and we'll land in Cuba and be home in a couple days" paradigm for hijacking is no longer valid.
This and the locked/reinforced cockpit doors are all that is necessary to prevent 9/11 from happening again.
9/11 wasn't a bomb plot so all this attempt to stop everything possible is simply ridiculous.
Actually if you check your history, government spending and infrastructure started to pull us out of the depression but as soon as any progress was started they slashed spending...which ended up extending it another 5-6 years. WWII is what finally pulled us out. Which itself was massive government spending.
Funny how the GOP is proposing we repeat history by slashing spending during a nascent recovery.
When the economy is in the crapper the government HAS to spend money. Otherwise you get a full blown Depression.
This is necessary spending, though sadly not enough of it.
When both business and consumer sectors aren't spending what do you do? Just wait for it to fix itself? Or do you start spending money to get money circulation and increase demand? The former gives you a Depression. You're choice.
The only way we will balance the budget is through growth.
Cutting spending reduces the amount of money circulating through the economy. The interest costs associated with that deficit spending are far less than say taking a Trillion dollars out of the economy. At some point people will stop lending us money but that point is decades away.
We had a relatively balanced budget and a booming economy back in 2000. Then someone cut taxes and added 4 trillion to the debt.
The system was relatively balanced and we would have been literally debt free by now had we left well enough alone. Would it have worked out that way in reality, obviously probably not. But the direction we were headed is a far sight better than what we got.
Actually most do not. The difference is revenue versus taxable income. Those 'small business' aren't making taxable incomes of a million dollars a year.
GOP defines Bechtel (billions in revenue) and PriceWaterHouseCoopers abig accounting firm are 'small' businesses by the GOP definition. Is a billion dollar a year company a 'small' business?
You really need to turn off Fox News once in a while. Just sayin...
Bush DOUBLED our debt. DOUBLED it. While being handed a 'balanced budget'. Obama was handed a tanking economy and has only added 50% or so to the debt. Granted Bush's 'double' and Obama's 50% are actually fairly close in real numbers (4 trillion I think).
Context matters. One person had a balanced budget and destroyed our financial outlook. Other was given an imploding economy and has halted that downslide and started back up if slowly. You guess who is who.
This was the case in some of the very first installations many years ago, but was rightly called out as unconstitutional and removed. I don't know of any cases where this is still case.
This is also exactly what I mean. This is the 'implementation' of the contract not the technology. It can and has been fixed.
Besides, having such obvious bias in the ticketing process means that those tickets are going to be thrown out...bye bye revenue stream. So cities won't do this.
The routine driving situation I hate the most is the light that turns yellow when I'm 3 to 4 seconds away from the intersection. Got to make a split second judgment on whether I can stop in time, and whether the vehicle behind me can also.
Then you're going to fast. If you hadn't noticed *everybody* speeds. So whatever they measure the yellow to be it's going to be too short because people are approaching at faster than the speed limit for which the light is set.
If you're going the speed limit and still get a ticket, fight it. It's funny how our system allows you to do that.
I read elsewhere that 3.9 seconds is a default setting
Sources?
And lets not forget less people are DEAD because of decreases in t-bone accidents. Not exactly a small thing...
As I said, without retraining the users of the system, you're going to get increases in misuse; i.e. accidents. You're own example shows that 2 of the 3 crashes were due to people not knowing how to 'use' the system.
The plain number of crashes isn't necessarily the right metric either. Generally speaking a t-bone accident has higher costs than most rear-end collisions, so an increase in rear-end collisions may still indicate a better result than fewer but more serious t-bones.
I'd also say you'd probably need a longer period of study than just a few months. If we aren't training people on them, which is realistically what will happen, you need to longer amounts of time for people to become adjusted.
I've never heard of the police using accident statistics to justify their placement of speed traps.
I suspect that's because increased speed leads to more severe and more likely fatal accidents and is a fairly settled area of knowledge.
Moreover, it isn't always the specific speed that's the problem but the differential between slowest and fastest. So if you have someone doing 20+ mph over posted, they are likely 10+ or more over the majority of the traffic and that will cause significant issues. Now have someone else doing 10 under posted and you have a 30 mph differential.
The faster you go, the less time you have to react to things you don't expect, like a slower but legal speed limit car pulling out in front of you. Maintaining a constant and relatively uniform speed on the road is much safer.
Obviously, out west with roads that are 50 miles exactly straight on flat level ground, this is a lot less of an issue, but those places also tend to be up to 70mph speeds these days as well.
Again, well and good, but it doesn't say *anything* about the red light camera technology itself.
As in my OP here, corruption is the problem, not the tool. And using an example of New Orleans? Completely proves my corruption point:)
Many of the original contracts were written such that the private company servicing the cameras got a cut of the ticket revenue. Clearly a bias in their operation. And again, bad implementation that proper oversight will catch.
I'm all in favor of independent and fair study of whether they are 'effective'. That has absolutely nothing to do with their management by corrupt or non-corrupt operators. Once you have the effectiveness determined, then you weigh the costs of operating the system against the benefits to be gained by operating it.
My biggest issue with studying this type of thing is that absolutely no one is ever 'trained' on how these systems work. Simply throwing a new technology into the mix without training the users is going to cause issues with their use. Hence why there is a noticeable spike in rear end collisions. People realize too late that the system is there and slam on the brakes. People behind them expect, through years of experience, that the person would continue through the light only to see a rapid screeching stop in front of them when they are following too closely to begin with.
Same purpose as speed limits. Reduce undesirable behavior by providing a fine when a certain threshold is exceeded.
This is really no different than if they installed radar speed guns that automatically issued tickets and started lowering the speed at which the tickets were issued.
Except that the consequences of the difference between 64mph and 66mph is a significantly lower than the 40mph t-bone accident and the rear end collisions these systems tend to cause (due to lack of driver training and awareness).
Slashdot Mirror
The 'problem' with nuclear isn't the actual deaths but the potential deaths. Sure not every one is explosive, but when they are it ain't pretty. That's why they build the things so massively redundant. It simply can not fail. Period.
Now put something like that on a coastline prone to quakes and tsunamis. It's a bad risk to take yet was labeled 'safe' quite recently.
If humans were involved in the design, construction or operation, there will be things that fail.
Even if they built a sea wall high enough to stop the wave...it wouldn't have been enough because the land 'sank' 3 feet.
I dunno after reading and posting above this struck me as the perfect comical response :) whether intended as such I don't know
Most solar deaths occur during the construction and installation phase of the life cycle.
Everything has construction 'deaths'. By that definition we shouldn't build 'roofs'.
:)
posted this above to your similar comment as well. Just making sure this shill talking point is properly annotated
Wind and solar kill people in construction accidents.
Which applies to pretty much anything built...ever.
Wind and solar simply don't have any operational impacts on human life. Every other power source, coal, oil, nuclear, have deaths from operational and failure scenarios. Nuclear waste being stored for 100s of years is going to cause problems or at least has the potential to be a source for deaths.
The issue with molten salts is the caustic nature...I don't know that we have materials yet that can withstand them in a closed system for 20+ years.
That said, the benefits you cite are quite promising.
Nuclear does kill less people. The difference is in specifically how, operational vs failure scenario.
Nuclear has basically zero operational fatalities, coal has numerous operations fatalities.
- Nuclear has no gas emissions etc
- coal gas emissions cause many deaths over time not even counting CO2. Mercury etc into the environment and overall health effects.
Coal has very very few failure fatalities, nuclear has fairly high potential failure fatalities.
- when a coal plant explodes, you can walk right in the next day. Deaths basically limited to workers on site at the time.
- nuclear obviously the failure mode has no 'good' solutions. Depending on the disaster it could be massive. It also renders 100s of sq miles uninhabitable for decades.
We tolerate coal because the deaths are widely dispersed and very much separate from the actual plant.
Nuclear disasters have been mitigated somewhat by the massive amounts of redundancy built into the plants. This is specifically done because of the potential risks of failure; i.e. it simply isn't an option.
Also not I'm not defending nuclear at all. I personally wish we could get off of it but the reality is renewable sources won't be ready for grid scale for another 50-100 years or so. We need to start that process now for that to be realized though.
Luckily, the passengers now understand that the "sit quietly and we'll land in Cuba and be home in a couple days" paradigm for hijacking is no longer valid.
This and the locked/reinforced cockpit doors are all that is necessary to prevent 9/11 from happening again.
9/11 wasn't a bomb plot so all this attempt to stop everything possible is simply ridiculous.
Actually if you check your history, government spending and infrastructure started to pull us out of the depression but as soon as any progress was started they slashed spending...which ended up extending it another 5-6 years. WWII is what finally pulled us out. Which itself was massive government spending.
Funny how the GOP is proposing we repeat history by slashing spending during a nascent recovery.
If you can finance a 10-year war over 30 years at 2%, that might be a pretty sound financial decision..
Rationalizing 4000 dead US Soldiers as a sound financial decision? priceless....
When the economy is in the crapper the government HAS to spend money. Otherwise you get a full blown Depression.
This is necessary spending, though sadly not enough of it.
When both business and consumer sectors aren't spending what do you do? Just wait for it to fix itself? Or do you start spending money to get money circulation and increase demand? The former gives you a Depression. You're choice.
The only way we will balance the budget is through growth.
Cutting spending reduces the amount of money circulating through the economy. The interest costs associated with that deficit spending are far less than say taking a Trillion dollars out of the economy. At some point people will stop lending us money but that point is decades away.
We had a relatively balanced budget and a booming economy back in 2000. Then someone cut taxes and added 4 trillion to the debt.
The system was relatively balanced and we would have been literally debt free by now had we left well enough alone. Would it have worked out that way in reality, obviously probably not. But the direction we were headed is a far sight better than what we got.
Actually most do not. The difference is revenue versus taxable income. Those 'small business' aren't making taxable incomes of a million dollars a year.
GOP defines Bechtel (billions in revenue) and PriceWaterHouseCoopers abig accounting firm are 'small' businesses by the GOP definition. Is a billion dollar a year company a 'small' business?
linky
You really need to turn off Fox News once in a while. Just sayin...
Bush DOUBLED our debt. DOUBLED it. While being handed a 'balanced budget'. Obama was handed a tanking economy and has only added 50% or so to the debt. Granted Bush's 'double' and Obama's 50% are actually fairly close in real numbers (4 trillion I think).
Context matters. One person had a balanced budget and destroyed our financial outlook. Other was given an imploding economy and has halted that downslide and started back up if slowly. You guess who is who.
I prefer the term 'factually correct'.
If you want to argue about the speed limit on an open road fine, however this discussion isn't about speed limits on open roads.
Maybe they are maybe they aren't risking safety...but they are still breaking the law.
It's about hiding from drivers who aren't obeying the law so they can't slow down ahead of time.
fixed that for you.
Speed is irrelevant if accidents aren't occuring.
Fortunately we're talking about *intersections* here where accidents can and do happen pretty regularly.
A traffic light should never require a driver to make a hard stop, never be too short for a heavy truck.
In the real world however, there is always a point at a given speed where you are at the make or break point.
If you are just far enough away that it's easy to say stop, the car just in front of you is closer and needs to make that split second decision.
Increasing yellows is fixing a symptom, not the problem. People will just become more accustomed to the longer yellow and react the same way.
This was the case in some of the very first installations many years ago, but was rightly called out as unconstitutional and removed. I don't know of any cases where this is still case.
This is also exactly what I mean. This is the 'implementation' of the contract not the technology. It can and has been fixed.
Besides, having such obvious bias in the ticketing process means that those tickets are going to be thrown out...bye bye revenue stream. So cities won't do this.
The routine driving situation I hate the most is the light that turns yellow when I'm 3 to 4 seconds away from the intersection. Got to make a split second judgment on whether I can stop in time, and whether the vehicle behind me can also.
Then you're going to fast. If you hadn't noticed *everybody* speeds. So whatever they measure the yellow to be it's going to be too short because people are approaching at faster than the speed limit for which the light is set.
If you're going the speed limit and still get a ticket, fight it. It's funny how our system allows you to do that.
I read elsewhere that 3.9 seconds is a default setting
Sources?
And lets not forget less people are DEAD because of decreases in t-bone accidents. Not exactly a small thing...
As I said, without retraining the users of the system, you're going to get increases in misuse; i.e. accidents. You're own example shows that 2 of the 3 crashes were due to people not knowing how to 'use' the system.
The plain number of crashes isn't necessarily the right metric either. Generally speaking a t-bone accident has higher costs than most rear-end collisions, so an increase in rear-end collisions may still indicate a better result than fewer but more serious t-bones.
I'd also say you'd probably need a longer period of study than just a few months. If we aren't training people on them, which is realistically what will happen, you need to longer amounts of time for people to become adjusted.
I've never heard of the police using accident statistics to justify their placement of speed traps.
I suspect that's because increased speed leads to more severe and more likely fatal accidents and is a fairly settled area of knowledge.
Moreover, it isn't always the specific speed that's the problem but the differential between slowest and fastest. So if you have someone doing 20+ mph over posted, they are likely 10+ or more over the majority of the traffic and that will cause significant issues. Now have someone else doing 10 under posted and you have a 30 mph differential.
The faster you go, the less time you have to react to things you don't expect, like a slower but legal speed limit car pulling out in front of you. Maintaining a constant and relatively uniform speed on the road is much safer.
Obviously, out west with roads that are 50 miles exactly straight on flat level ground, this is a lot less of an issue, but those places also tend to be up to 70mph speeds these days as well.
Again, well and good, but it doesn't say *anything* about the red light camera technology itself.
:)
As in my OP here, corruption is the problem, not the tool. And using an example of New Orleans? Completely proves my corruption point
Many of the original contracts were written such that the private company servicing the cameras got a cut of the ticket revenue. Clearly a bias in their operation. And again, bad implementation that proper oversight will catch.
I'm all in favor of independent and fair study of whether they are 'effective'. That has absolutely nothing to do with their management by corrupt or non-corrupt operators. Once you have the effectiveness determined, then you weigh the costs of operating the system against the benefits to be gained by operating it.
My biggest issue with studying this type of thing is that absolutely no one is ever 'trained' on how these systems work. Simply throwing a new technology into the mix without training the users is going to cause issues with their use. Hence why there is a noticeable spike in rear end collisions. People realize too late that the system is there and slam on the brakes. People behind them expect, through years of experience, that the person would continue through the light only to see a rapid screeching stop in front of them when they are following too closely to begin with.
Same purpose as speed limits. Reduce undesirable behavior by providing a fine when a certain threshold is exceeded.
This is really no different than if they installed radar speed guns that automatically issued tickets and started lowering the speed at which the tickets were issued.
Except that the consequences of the difference between 64mph and 66mph is a significantly lower than the 40mph t-bone accident and the rear end collisions these systems tend to cause (due to lack of driver training and awareness).
I didn't blindly state that they were effective. I said thatthe corruption of the operators doesn't say anything about the tool.