This is so transparently political. Every tax form in the US comes with the ability to pay more than you are required. It's totally up to the person filing the taxes. If these rich guys want to pay more, then they should just PAY MORE and stop with the grandstanding.
Oh, and I bet each of them has an army of accountants going over their taxes every year to keep their tax burden down as low as possible.
Really makes you wonder why they're doing this publicity stunt. They're not stupid. They know they can pay higher taxes if they want. They're either doing this to make themselves look good or make someone else look bad. Or because they're expecting political favors. Hell, maybe all three.
*In practice this is a little tricky, since defining what is "income" and what is "owned property" would have be done carefully to avoid loopholes.
Or you could avoid both these "tricky" scenarios and go with a pure consumption tax where you're taxed not on what you make or what you own but what you spend. Economic study after economic study proves this is the fairest, most equitable solution. The details can be found at FairTax.org. Practically every scenario of "well, that's great but what if somebody does THIS..." has been examined and accounted for.
I'll give you a hint, the rocket you would need to change the orbit of a belt asteroid would contain more energy than you would achieve from hitting a city with it.
You, sir, get a fail in orbital mechanics. With gravitational assists and a long-running ion drive, you can get some rocks up to a very impressive speed, especially since everything in the belt (presumably your source of asteroids) is "downhill" in the gravity well direction of Earth. You don't need a very big rock, you just need it to go very, very fast. A rock the size of a bus would do quite nicely if you accelerated it to a few times orbital velocity.
Granted, such a thing would be immensely expensive and take years to plan, build, not to mention the many months or years of trajectory to build up speed. And hitting a specific target would be difficult given the Earth is both spinning and orbiting the sun during your whole "speed this rock up" phase years in advance. But it's all very doable even with current tech. It's just cheaper to use good old fashioned bombs or nukes.
If you say that we'll just mine it on Mars, that won't work because the heavy equipment isn't up there, and neither are the refineries, smelters, fuel, etc.
Why be so short-sighted and ignore the obvious solution? You don't start with stone axes on Mars and build your industrial society from there. You take some of your technology with you when you go. Yes, it's fantastically expensive to move mass from Earth to Mars (hence my earlier comment on why the Moon is a better initial target) but it's still less expensive than starting from scratch. And there's nothing impossible or even difficult about sending stuff like smelters, excavators, extruders, and so forth to Mars; it's just expensive. But, like all things with cost/benefit equations, when there's a compelling reason to do it (either political, economic, or military) it will get done. You act like it's impossible because the gear isn't there waiting on us already.
So.... exactly how many people currently live (as in "make homes, produce stuff, marry and make children, etc", as opposed to just visit for research) deep underwater?
Deep ocean habitats, along with the other examples like Arctic habitats, aren't readily done not because it's a technological challenge but for other much more practical reasons. For example, there is no pressing need for us to inhabit such extreme climates because we have much more habitable ones in plentiful supply right next door. Further, such climates are not only physically difficult but they're psychologically inhospitable in that you can't find too many people with a compelling desire to live in such conditions. The only reason we have such habitats right now is for scientific research and maybe a few economically interesting ones (undersea oil exploration, for example, which is something that's been dabbled in over the decades).
None of this does anything to dispute the OP's point, namely that these are already solved technological problems. Unlike your "stroll on the sun" comment, there's nothing required engineering-wise which is stopping us from doing it tomorrow. The fact that we don't doesn't imply we can't or won't. Should a sudden compelling reason come up -- discovery of valuable resources which are economically recoverable, for example -- you'd find people and firms lined up to make it happen.
Yay, let's spread even more tons of ionizing radiation into the atmosphere than we already have!! And near places that are a lot more populated than Las Vegas in 1958!!
Umm...I don't know if you're being intentionally ignorant in an attempt at humor or just uninformed, but nuclear rocket designs generally call for them to be used only in space. Furthermore, spewing ionizing radiation into the air isn't remotely harmful unless something organic is being struck by said radiation. It's not like it hurts the air molecules.
There was a Cold War project to build a nuclear-powered bomber. They constructed the actual engine and it worked. Yes, it was hideously dangerous to be behind the engine while it was operating but it didn't spew permanent stuff like fallout or anything. Unless you were within range of the radiation while it was operating, it had no permanent effects on anything. The ultimately scrapped the project though due to weight (it had to have shielding for the crew), cost, and the fact that good old fashioned jet engines did most jobs quite well and ICBM's did whatever the bombers couldn't do.
Yes, I'm aware there were some designs -- even scale prototypes -- of fission rockets for atmospheric use that did spew fallout. None of these were seriously considered for obvious reasons.
There is really only one goal that makes such expenditures worthwhile. That is the establishment of a permanent self-sustaining human colony off the Earth.
Not to be pithy, but "the moon" qualifies as "off Earth" you know. Yes, it's not as sexy as Mars, but it's much closer. Much easier to get to and support a manned colony there than Mars. That equates to cheaper. And therefore all this makes the moon a better target assuming your "one goal" is really that. What makes Mars a better target for colonization? It's atmosphere is so thin there's little difference between it and vacuum as far as survival goes. There's water on both the moon and Mars. Neither body has a substantial magnetic field so no advantage there. What's the real compelling case to colonize Mars before the moon?
Scientists will argue there's little to be done on the moon of value compared to places like Mars or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. I agree. But that's not what was stated. Pure science can be done much cheaper and safer with probes, at least to begin with. Colonization requires meat sacks and their attendant sources of food, water, and atmosphere.
but it's not like every nuclear plant is constantly running at 100% capacity.
With very few exceptions, all nuclear plants are used for base load generation and thus run as close to full capacity 24x7 as can be achieved. This is one of the things that makes nuclear so economical. The only time they're not running at full throttle is when they're shutting down for maintenance, coming back online from maintenance, or if there's an unscheduled issue like a turbine trip.
Yes, but only if it's not summer and the river is to low to cool the reactor or in winter when the river is frozen or if there's another 'incident' shutting down the plant for months or a typhoon is expected or a large wave...(sic)
These events, while they have happened, have only been notable because they almost never happened before or since. There's a reason uptime figures for the nuclear industry are routinely above 90%, and that includes time spent in shutdown for scheduled maintenance and refueling.
Not to mention, when a wind turbine fails catastrophically, there's a dent in the shrubbery and not a relocation of 100.000 people for a couple of thousand years like when a reactor fails that way.
In the entire history of commercial nuclear power (almost half a century) only two events have taken place that required any sort of relocation. One of those was due to operators deliberately operating the plant outside of specifications and disregarding all safety regulations with a plant design that is no longer used because of its instability (Chernobyl). The other was at a plant that was hit by a massive earthquake followed by a massive tsunami. Tens of thousands were killed by the quake and tsunami. Zero deaths were attributed to anything nuclear.
Reports of nuclear deadliness have been greatly exaggerated. No doubt on purpose, to fit a particular agenda.
Another boon is that wind turbines don't produce material for dirty bombs that you have to guard for a couple of hundred thousand years.
This is a political failing, not a technological one. We have the ability to burn waste actinides, extracting useful energy, closing the nuclear fuel cycle, and leaving very little behind that is dangerous. President Carter banned R&D into this technology back in the 1970's and it's been a political hot potato ever since.
If uninformed alarmists like you would ever shut the hell up and actually learn something about what you're denigrating, you might see that idea reversed. But whole generations have been raised on the idea that nuclear = bad so I doubt that's going to happen. You're comfortable in your ignorance.
Easy: actual generation varies according to demand, and demand is highest in the summer.
Yes load varies but nuclear output does not. Nuclear is "base load" meaning it runs at full capacity from the time it's brought online until it's shut down for maintenance/refueling. The variable load is carried by assets that can be throttled economically, like combined-cycle gas turbines, hydroelectric, etc.
So, if you consider power usage as a series of troughs and peaks, "base load" facilities carry everything up to the "trough" part. The "peak" parts are carried by variable assets. Nuclear is not nearly as economical if you try throttling it. Basically you're wasting reactivity by doing so.
Demand tends to vary, so nuclear plants are also adjustable.
Uhhh, no. I used to work at nuclear plants for TVA as recently as last year. Nuclear plants are "base load" facilities, meaning they run at 100% (or as close to that as possible) 24x7. The variable loads are carried by other sources like hydroelectric, combined-cycle turbines, and so forth. In fact, nuclear is about the ONLY type of power generation that runs at full throttle during its entire cycle between refuelings.
The 90% factor cited by one of the other posters is more or less correct because commercial generation plants go offline for refueling about once every 18-24 months depending upon how they've been run during that fuel cycle. Things like turbine trips and other unscheduled shutdowns affect when refuelings actually occur, and only about 1/3 of the fuel is changed out every cycle.
You should have taken the prior poster's advice because your ignorance is really showing here. It doesn't matter whether you're in the city or the country, cell towers don't allow the same positional accuracy as GPS. They're not even remotely close. Sure, the phone company knows what tower you're associated with, but that tower covers several city BLOCKS at the very least. Given that thousands of other cell phones are likely in that same urban radius, it makes locating you via cell tower kind of ridiculous.
This touches on most of the reasoning but leaves out the most obvious thing: the B-52 is as close to the "ideal" for a subsonic bomb truck that we've been able to come up with.
Look, we need different types and numbers of aircraft for any given military engagement. They should be:
1. A small, elite force of the best stealth and precision-targeting weapons we can muster as a nation, flown by the most rigidly-trained men and women our nation has to offer. These forces lead the initial attack, destroying command and control facilities, air defenses, air bases, and logistics. Given our huge lead in these areas of technology over our hypothetical foes, these missions should have a very high success rate and low attrition rate.
2. Once the enemy air force and air defenses have been beaten down, the value of stealth is greatly diminished. At this point we're far better served by cheaper, less maintenance-intensive forces like a B-52 or A-10. Their ruggedness and numbers make them ideal for this lower-threat environment where stealthy options would be too expensive to maintain and too valuable to lose in a protracted fight.
3. When all major targets are bombed into oblivion by the forces in item #2, you need to keep a constant presence around to deter regrowth. But things like B-52's are expensive to keep flying around waiting on something to bomb. Far better to spend money on armed drones which can orbit for a full day, out of sight, waiting to deliver a "bolt from the blue" when a bad guy steps outside for a piss. All the destructive power of a precision-guided munition married to the omnipresent terror of a sniper in an unknown and unreachable location.
You should read "Red Storm Rising" by Tom Clancy. Saturating the missile defenses of a carrier battle group aren't as hard as you think. Squadrons of strategic bombers (Tu-22M and successors) can carry more ASM's than the carrier battle group has SAM's, and they can launch them out of range of carrier-based interceptors. And this assumes the SAM's are any good at hitting the incoming missiles. Peacetime testing has been depressingly inconclusive on how effective this defense really is.
And even if you don't have enough bombers to carry enough missiles to empty the SAM magazines of a carrier battle group in one mission, those bombers can refuel, rearm, and sortie again in less than a day. The carrier battle group has to put into port to rearm or perform a very vulnerable underway replenishment.
Further, it's not like the bad guys need to scout for the battle group either. Satellites know where they are 24x7. The carriers can't hide. They can't fight off successive attacks by long-range land-based bombers carrying long-range missiles. They're hideously vulnerable yet the Navy continues to insist otherwise. Reminds me of how we were in 1941 regarding the invincibility of the battleship against the airplane.
There are all kinds of problems with what you propose but I'll touch on some of the most obvious ones:
1. Subs don't just rely on torpedoes. They can launch anti-ship missiles as well, from very close range. 2. Detonating a torpedo using underwater "slat armor" or netting wouldn't help much. Water is very good at transmitting blast force because it's incompressible. Look up "water hammer effect" and you'll see what I mean. Unless the armor/netting is an impractically-long distance from the hull, a nearby detonation is going to do a lot of damage. 3. Such armor and/or netting would cause so much drag as to make the ship impractical to move or maneuver. 4. Such armor and/or netting would only work once if it worked at all. Subsequent shots to the same area would go through the hold in the armor/netting and hit the hull. Same thing happened with tank/anti-tank weaponry. See "tandem charge warhead" under anti-tank weapons. The first charge defeats your anti-warhead countermeasure. The second charge is applied directly to the hull of the vehicle.
Never mind the fact that if you launch an ICBM, every other nuclear power will see a first strike attempt, and launch counterstrikes. Won't that be fun? You sink a cruiser with an ICBM, and everyone else lays waste to your country with nuclear weapons. Great trade-off, eh?
Let me propose a hypothetical situation to you and see what you think would happen.
Suppose the US and China get into an escalation that involves an actual shooting war. Good example: we put a carrier battle group off their artificial island in the South China Sea, they scream it's a violation of their sovereignty, and it escalates from there until somebody pulls a trigger or two. Let us further suppose at some point the Chinese pop a tactical nuke over our carrier battle group and wipe the entire thing out. Thousands of sailors dead, billions in hardware destroyed. Now what?
Do you honestly see the US immediately escalating to nuking cities as you propose? Do you think the current administration would ever do anything like that?
Now reverse the roles. If we nuked a Chinese battle group (assuming they had one to nuke, which they currently don't), do you think they'd show the same restraint?
Making the shells longer, heavier and faster doesn't help. They've already got more than enough penetrating power to go all the way through. The trouble is transferring energy to the target rather than the sea underneath.
You act like applying it to the sea underneath is somehow inferior to hitting the vessel itself. All that kinetic energy has to go somewhere. If the vessel is effectively tissue paper, the ocean beneath it is not, being made of this incompressible stuff called "water." The water would vaporize explosively. If the ship wasn't destroyed outright by such a blast, it would undoubtedly be sunk by the following void "crater" in the water when the ocean sweeps back in. You don't even need to hit the ship at this point; the water vaporization blast would almost certainly be enough.
I guess you don't pay much attention to current events in places like Ukraine (Russian invasion) or the South China Sea (Chinese laying claim to international waters). But hey, go right on with that narrative that the US is the only one doing the saber rattling. You're sounding totally credible at this point.
You think our interests are global. How did you come to that conclusion? By your reasoning, all countries should have global interests that they defend, and should be bombing the crap out of the world like we are.
You're right, we should never take an interest in anything that happens outside our borders because we don't need anyone else's oil, or steel, food, or valuable minerals to keep our economy humming. Yep, we can just sit back and the world couldn't possible evolve into something that might threaten our interests. I mean, it's not like that happened in the 1930's and caused a hundred million deaths. Nah, that's just crazy talk.
You know, the sad thing is people like you are utterly oblivious to history. I don't so much mind you having to relive it because of your ignorance, but I really hate it when there's a lot of you out there and your ignorance causes the rest of us to have to relive it and, usually, die for it as well.
After Medicare, the skilled nursing facility is billing ME over $4000 a month.
And thus you stumble upon the core of the problem, completely bypass it, and move along to a false conclusion.
Have you ever stopped to wonder WHY you got a bill for $4k...and that's AFTER Medicare paid the lion's share?
Go have a conversation with ANY healthcare professional working in a hospital and you'll see they're not getting rich from these fees. The hospitals themselves are permanently on the edge of bankruptcy as well. Who's making out a like a bandit here? Big Pharma? Nope. Although many pharma companies are doing quite well, it's not because they're making bank on everyday schlubs like you and me. They make bank on stuff like Viagra.
So where does all the money go if it doesn't go to the healthcare providers, their facilities, or the drug companies? It goes to insurance and legal fees. Malpractice insurance is insanely expensive, largely because lawyers make insane money suing doctors.
So, if you want lower healthcare costs you should be pushing for tort reform. But nobody seems to be smart enough to connect the dots. They just see a big bill from the hospital and assume the healthcare system is broken. Look deeper. Follow the money. It's not healthcare, it's the legal system that's sucking you dry.
They are over there to destabilize governments that are currently not favorable to US policy. Once destabilized, they get puppets installed that will do as they tell them to.
Please explain to me, in concrete terms, how this is a problem for me, because from where I'm sitting there are three possible kinds of "other governments" to choose from:
1. Friendlies/Allies - They're on our side, work with us, support us, and don't cause trouble for us. 2. Neutrals - They're not on anybody's side. They neither help nor hinder us. 3. Enemies - They actively work against our interests and foment violence against us.
We have no need to destabilize category #1. Category #2 isn't a problem either since they don't interfere with us. Our problem is with category #3, and those are the kind I *want* destabilized, overthrown, and replaced with governments more friendly to us.
I don't care if you're a despot or a democratically-elected People's President of Whateve-istan, if you declare yourself opposed to our interests, we're going to oppose you. And we're a fearsome thing to oppose when we choose to be and when we have leadership that actually includes a spine.
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And they left Hillary and Bernie completely brainless, so no hope this therapy will do anything for them.
What? Government abuses the power it is given to control and oppress its own citizens?
CLEARLY WE NEED TO GIVE THE GOVERNMENT EVEN MORE POWER OVER OUR LIVES! #FeelTheBern
A government program, years late and millions over budget and still isn't as good as what the private sector already had? SHOCKED! Shocked I am!
Clearly these same type of people need to be placed in charge of our healthcare!
This is so transparently political. Every tax form in the US comes with the ability to pay more than you are required. It's totally up to the person filing the taxes. If these rich guys want to pay more, then they should just PAY MORE and stop with the grandstanding.
Oh, and I bet each of them has an army of accountants going over their taxes every year to keep their tax burden down as low as possible.
Really makes you wonder why they're doing this publicity stunt. They're not stupid. They know they can pay higher taxes if they want. They're either doing this to make themselves look good or make someone else look bad. Or because they're expecting political favors. Hell, maybe all three.
*In practice this is a little tricky, since defining what is "income" and what is "owned property" would have be done carefully to avoid loopholes.
Or you could avoid both these "tricky" scenarios and go with a pure consumption tax where you're taxed not on what you make or what you own but what you spend. Economic study after economic study proves this is the fairest, most equitable solution. The details can be found at FairTax.org. Practically every scenario of "well, that's great but what if somebody does THIS..." has been examined and accounted for.
I'll give you a hint, the rocket you would need to change the orbit of a belt asteroid would contain more energy than you would achieve from hitting a city with it.
You, sir, get a fail in orbital mechanics. With gravitational assists and a long-running ion drive, you can get some rocks up to a very impressive speed, especially since everything in the belt (presumably your source of asteroids) is "downhill" in the gravity well direction of Earth. You don't need a very big rock, you just need it to go very, very fast. A rock the size of a bus would do quite nicely if you accelerated it to a few times orbital velocity.
Granted, such a thing would be immensely expensive and take years to plan, build, not to mention the many months or years of trajectory to build up speed. And hitting a specific target would be difficult given the Earth is both spinning and orbiting the sun during your whole "speed this rock up" phase years in advance. But it's all very doable even with current tech. It's just cheaper to use good old fashioned bombs or nukes.
What? No Christina Hendricks? Who cares if she's batshit crazy when she has curves like that...and a redhead to boot!
If you say that we'll just mine it on Mars, that won't work because the heavy equipment isn't up there, and neither are the refineries, smelters, fuel, etc.
Why be so short-sighted and ignore the obvious solution? You don't start with stone axes on Mars and build your industrial society from there. You take some of your technology with you when you go. Yes, it's fantastically expensive to move mass from Earth to Mars (hence my earlier comment on why the Moon is a better initial target) but it's still less expensive than starting from scratch. And there's nothing impossible or even difficult about sending stuff like smelters, excavators, extruders, and so forth to Mars; it's just expensive. But, like all things with cost/benefit equations, when there's a compelling reason to do it (either political, economic, or military) it will get done. You act like it's impossible because the gear isn't there waiting on us already.
So.... exactly how many people currently live (as in "make homes, produce stuff, marry and make children, etc", as opposed to just visit for research) deep underwater?
Deep ocean habitats, along with the other examples like Arctic habitats, aren't readily done not because it's a technological challenge but for other much more practical reasons. For example, there is no pressing need for us to inhabit such extreme climates because we have much more habitable ones in plentiful supply right next door. Further, such climates are not only physically difficult but they're psychologically inhospitable in that you can't find too many people with a compelling desire to live in such conditions. The only reason we have such habitats right now is for scientific research and maybe a few economically interesting ones (undersea oil exploration, for example, which is something that's been dabbled in over the decades).
None of this does anything to dispute the OP's point, namely that these are already solved technological problems. Unlike your "stroll on the sun" comment, there's nothing required engineering-wise which is stopping us from doing it tomorrow. The fact that we don't doesn't imply we can't or won't. Should a sudden compelling reason come up -- discovery of valuable resources which are economically recoverable, for example -- you'd find people and firms lined up to make it happen.
We need nuclear power rockets yesterday
Yay, let's spread even more tons of ionizing radiation into the atmosphere than we already have!! And near places that are a lot more populated than Las Vegas in 1958!!
Umm...I don't know if you're being intentionally ignorant in an attempt at humor or just uninformed, but nuclear rocket designs generally call for them to be used only in space. Furthermore, spewing ionizing radiation into the air isn't remotely harmful unless something organic is being struck by said radiation. It's not like it hurts the air molecules.
There was a Cold War project to build a nuclear-powered bomber. They constructed the actual engine and it worked. Yes, it was hideously dangerous to be behind the engine while it was operating but it didn't spew permanent stuff like fallout or anything. Unless you were within range of the radiation while it was operating, it had no permanent effects on anything. The ultimately scrapped the project though due to weight (it had to have shielding for the crew), cost, and the fact that good old fashioned jet engines did most jobs quite well and ICBM's did whatever the bombers couldn't do.
Yes, I'm aware there were some designs -- even scale prototypes -- of fission rockets for atmospheric use that did spew fallout. None of these were seriously considered for obvious reasons.
There is really only one goal that makes such expenditures worthwhile. That is the establishment of a permanent self-sustaining human colony off the Earth.
Not to be pithy, but "the moon" qualifies as "off Earth" you know. Yes, it's not as sexy as Mars, but it's much closer. Much easier to get to and support a manned colony there than Mars. That equates to cheaper. And therefore all this makes the moon a better target assuming your "one goal" is really that. What makes Mars a better target for colonization? It's atmosphere is so thin there's little difference between it and vacuum as far as survival goes. There's water on both the moon and Mars. Neither body has a substantial magnetic field so no advantage there. What's the real compelling case to colonize Mars before the moon?
Scientists will argue there's little to be done on the moon of value compared to places like Mars or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. I agree. But that's not what was stated. Pure science can be done much cheaper and safer with probes, at least to begin with. Colonization requires meat sacks and their attendant sources of food, water, and atmosphere.
but it's not like every nuclear plant is constantly running at 100% capacity.
With very few exceptions, all nuclear plants are used for base load generation and thus run as close to full capacity 24x7 as can be achieved. This is one of the things that makes nuclear so economical. The only time they're not running at full throttle is when they're shutting down for maintenance, coming back online from maintenance, or if there's an unscheduled issue like a turbine trip.
Yes, but only if it's not summer and the river is to low to cool the reactor or in winter when the river is frozen or if there's another 'incident' shutting down the plant for months or a typhoon is expected or a large wave...(sic)
These events, while they have happened, have only been notable because they almost never happened before or since. There's a reason uptime figures for the nuclear industry are routinely above 90%, and that includes time spent in shutdown for scheduled maintenance and refueling.
Not to mention, when a wind turbine fails catastrophically, there's a dent in the shrubbery and not a relocation of 100.000 people for a couple of thousand years like when a reactor fails that way.
In the entire history of commercial nuclear power (almost half a century) only two events have taken place that required any sort of relocation. One of those was due to operators deliberately operating the plant outside of specifications and disregarding all safety regulations with a plant design that is no longer used because of its instability (Chernobyl). The other was at a plant that was hit by a massive earthquake followed by a massive tsunami. Tens of thousands were killed by the quake and tsunami. Zero deaths were attributed to anything nuclear.
Reports of nuclear deadliness have been greatly exaggerated. No doubt on purpose, to fit a particular agenda.
Another boon is that wind turbines don't produce material for dirty bombs that you have to guard for a couple of hundred thousand years.
This is a political failing, not a technological one. We have the ability to burn waste actinides, extracting useful energy, closing the nuclear fuel cycle, and leaving very little behind that is dangerous. President Carter banned R&D into this technology back in the 1970's and it's been a political hot potato ever since.
If uninformed alarmists like you would ever shut the hell up and actually learn something about what you're denigrating, you might see that idea reversed. But whole generations have been raised on the idea that nuclear = bad so I doubt that's going to happen. You're comfortable in your ignorance.
Easy: actual generation varies according to demand, and demand is highest in the summer.
Yes load varies but nuclear output does not. Nuclear is "base load" meaning it runs at full capacity from the time it's brought online until it's shut down for maintenance/refueling. The variable load is carried by assets that can be throttled economically, like combined-cycle gas turbines, hydroelectric, etc.
So, if you consider power usage as a series of troughs and peaks, "base load" facilities carry everything up to the "trough" part. The "peak" parts are carried by variable assets. Nuclear is not nearly as economical if you try throttling it. Basically you're wasting reactivity by doing so.
Demand tends to vary, so nuclear plants are also adjustable.
Uhhh, no. I used to work at nuclear plants for TVA as recently as last year. Nuclear plants are "base load" facilities, meaning they run at 100% (or as close to that as possible) 24x7. The variable loads are carried by other sources like hydroelectric, combined-cycle turbines, and so forth. In fact, nuclear is about the ONLY type of power generation that runs at full throttle during its entire cycle between refuelings.
The 90% factor cited by one of the other posters is more or less correct because commercial generation plants go offline for refueling about once every 18-24 months depending upon how they've been run during that fuel cycle. Things like turbine trips and other unscheduled shutdowns affect when refuelings actually occur, and only about 1/3 of the fuel is changed out every cycle.
You should have taken the prior poster's advice because your ignorance is really showing here. It doesn't matter whether you're in the city or the country, cell towers don't allow the same positional accuracy as GPS. They're not even remotely close. Sure, the phone company knows what tower you're associated with, but that tower covers several city BLOCKS at the very least. Given that thousands of other cell phones are likely in that same urban radius, it makes locating you via cell tower kind of ridiculous.
Read this and you'll see the how and why.
This touches on most of the reasoning but leaves out the most obvious thing: the B-52 is as close to the "ideal" for a subsonic bomb truck that we've been able to come up with.
Look, we need different types and numbers of aircraft for any given military engagement. They should be:
1. A small, elite force of the best stealth and precision-targeting weapons we can muster as a nation, flown by the most rigidly-trained men and women our nation has to offer. These forces lead the initial attack, destroying command and control facilities, air defenses, air bases, and logistics. Given our huge lead in these areas of technology over our hypothetical foes, these missions should have a very high success rate and low attrition rate.
2. Once the enemy air force and air defenses have been beaten down, the value of stealth is greatly diminished. At this point we're far better served by cheaper, less maintenance-intensive forces like a B-52 or A-10. Their ruggedness and numbers make them ideal for this lower-threat environment where stealthy options would be too expensive to maintain and too valuable to lose in a protracted fight.
3. When all major targets are bombed into oblivion by the forces in item #2, you need to keep a constant presence around to deter regrowth. But things like B-52's are expensive to keep flying around waiting on something to bomb. Far better to spend money on armed drones which can orbit for a full day, out of sight, waiting to deliver a "bolt from the blue" when a bad guy steps outside for a piss. All the destructive power of a precision-guided munition married to the omnipresent terror of a sniper in an unknown and unreachable location.
You should read "Red Storm Rising" by Tom Clancy. Saturating the missile defenses of a carrier battle group aren't as hard as you think. Squadrons of strategic bombers (Tu-22M and successors) can carry more ASM's than the carrier battle group has SAM's, and they can launch them out of range of carrier-based interceptors. And this assumes the SAM's are any good at hitting the incoming missiles. Peacetime testing has been depressingly inconclusive on how effective this defense really is.
And even if you don't have enough bombers to carry enough missiles to empty the SAM magazines of a carrier battle group in one mission, those bombers can refuel, rearm, and sortie again in less than a day. The carrier battle group has to put into port to rearm or perform a very vulnerable underway replenishment.
Further, it's not like the bad guys need to scout for the battle group either. Satellites know where they are 24x7. The carriers can't hide. They can't fight off successive attacks by long-range land-based bombers carrying long-range missiles. They're hideously vulnerable yet the Navy continues to insist otherwise. Reminds me of how we were in 1941 regarding the invincibility of the battleship against the airplane.
There are all kinds of problems with what you propose but I'll touch on some of the most obvious ones:
1. Subs don't just rely on torpedoes. They can launch anti-ship missiles as well, from very close range.
2. Detonating a torpedo using underwater "slat armor" or netting wouldn't help much. Water is very good at transmitting blast force because it's incompressible. Look up "water hammer effect" and you'll see what I mean. Unless the armor/netting is an impractically-long distance from the hull, a nearby detonation is going to do a lot of damage.
3. Such armor and/or netting would cause so much drag as to make the ship impractical to move or maneuver.
4. Such armor and/or netting would only work once if it worked at all. Subsequent shots to the same area would go through the hold in the armor/netting and hit the hull. Same thing happened with tank/anti-tank weaponry. See "tandem charge warhead" under anti-tank weapons. The first charge defeats your anti-warhead countermeasure. The second charge is applied directly to the hull of the vehicle.
Never mind the fact that if you launch an ICBM, every other nuclear power will see a first strike attempt, and launch counterstrikes. Won't that be fun? You sink a cruiser with an ICBM, and everyone else lays waste to your country with nuclear weapons. Great trade-off, eh?
Let me propose a hypothetical situation to you and see what you think would happen.
Suppose the US and China get into an escalation that involves an actual shooting war. Good example: we put a carrier battle group off their artificial island in the South China Sea, they scream it's a violation of their sovereignty, and it escalates from there until somebody pulls a trigger or two. Let us further suppose at some point the Chinese pop a tactical nuke over our carrier battle group and wipe the entire thing out. Thousands of sailors dead, billions in hardware destroyed. Now what?
Do you honestly see the US immediately escalating to nuking cities as you propose? Do you think the current administration would ever do anything like that?
Now reverse the roles. If we nuked a Chinese battle group (assuming they had one to nuke, which they currently don't), do you think they'd show the same restraint?
Making the shells longer, heavier and faster doesn't help. They've already got more than enough penetrating power to go all the way through. The trouble is transferring energy to the target rather than the sea underneath.
You act like applying it to the sea underneath is somehow inferior to hitting the vessel itself. All that kinetic energy has to go somewhere. If the vessel is effectively tissue paper, the ocean beneath it is not, being made of this incompressible stuff called "water." The water would vaporize explosively. If the ship wasn't destroyed outright by such a blast, it would undoubtedly be sunk by the following void "crater" in the water when the ocean sweeps back in. You don't even need to hit the ship at this point; the water vaporization blast would almost certainly be enough.
The US is the only country that acts that way.
I guess you don't pay much attention to current events in places like Ukraine (Russian invasion) or the South China Sea (Chinese laying claim to international waters). But hey, go right on with that narrative that the US is the only one doing the saber rattling. You're sounding totally credible at this point.
You think our interests are global. How did you come to that conclusion? By your reasoning, all countries should have global interests that they defend, and should be bombing the crap out of the world like we are.
You're right, we should never take an interest in anything that happens outside our borders because we don't need anyone else's oil, or steel, food, or valuable minerals to keep our economy humming. Yep, we can just sit back and the world couldn't possible evolve into something that might threaten our interests. I mean, it's not like that happened in the 1930's and caused a hundred million deaths. Nah, that's just crazy talk.
You know, the sad thing is people like you are utterly oblivious to history. I don't so much mind you having to relive it because of your ignorance, but I really hate it when there's a lot of you out there and your ignorance causes the rest of us to have to relive it and, usually, die for it as well.
After Medicare, the skilled nursing facility is billing ME over $4000 a month.
And thus you stumble upon the core of the problem, completely bypass it, and move along to a false conclusion.
Have you ever stopped to wonder WHY you got a bill for $4k...and that's AFTER Medicare paid the lion's share?
Go have a conversation with ANY healthcare professional working in a hospital and you'll see they're not getting rich from these fees. The hospitals themselves are permanently on the edge of bankruptcy as well. Who's making out a like a bandit here? Big Pharma? Nope. Although many pharma companies are doing quite well, it's not because they're making bank on everyday schlubs like you and me. They make bank on stuff like Viagra.
So where does all the money go if it doesn't go to the healthcare providers, their facilities, or the drug companies? It goes to insurance and legal fees. Malpractice insurance is insanely expensive, largely because lawyers make insane money suing doctors.
So, if you want lower healthcare costs you should be pushing for tort reform. But nobody seems to be smart enough to connect the dots. They just see a big bill from the hospital and assume the healthcare system is broken. Look deeper. Follow the money. It's not healthcare, it's the legal system that's sucking you dry.
They are over there to destabilize governments that are currently not favorable to US policy. Once destabilized, they get puppets installed that will do as they tell them to.
Please explain to me, in concrete terms, how this is a problem for me, because from where I'm sitting there are three possible kinds of "other governments" to choose from:
1. Friendlies/Allies - They're on our side, work with us, support us, and don't cause trouble for us.
2. Neutrals - They're not on anybody's side. They neither help nor hinder us.
3. Enemies - They actively work against our interests and foment violence against us.
We have no need to destabilize category #1. Category #2 isn't a problem either since they don't interfere with us. Our problem is with category #3, and those are the kind I *want* destabilized, overthrown, and replaced with governments more friendly to us.
I don't care if you're a despot or a democratically-elected People's President of Whateve-istan, if you declare yourself opposed to our interests, we're going to oppose you. And we're a fearsome thing to oppose when we choose to be and when we have leadership that actually includes a spine.