Of course running a 50-year plant with all the sunk costs paid is "profitable". But that's only true if you consider all the costs "sunk". When you consider the parts of the plant that need to be replaced due to age and wear, suddenly the costs aren't all sunk and the plants aren't profitable.
Did you miss the posts from the guy who works in nuclear plant repair, and pointed out all the horrifying things he's seen wrong in plants that just don't get fixed?
You've missed the point. The old plants will not go away just because new ones are built.
How did I miss the point when I said "Make it...mandatory, that every plant with these fundamentally unsound design be replaced"?
It's not economically valuable to run the old plant when, by choosing to do so, your company is sued into bankruptcy by the government, while you and your fellow executives are placed in prison.
I'm describing how we can fix a problem and make the world a safer place. I don't expect it to happen, because we live in a society where profit is more important than safety, for any sufficiently-large value of profit.
Parent is merely pointing out that some notion of 'natural' is an ethereal thing open to wild range of interpretation and that the biosystem on Earth is dynamic and changing all the time.
Parent tried to make a joke about earth's "natural" state being pre-oxygenation of the atmosphere. Parent's joke failed.
You're trying to portray humans as insignificant specs in the grand scheme of a constantly-changing "nature", in an effort to justify taking no action to manage the large impacts humans are having on the environment. Your argument failed, too. Sorry.
That should have been obvious from the rest of my post. I was dismissing criticism of solar power based on a larger catastrophe. The same applies to nuclear. ("OMG! What if a meteor 2 miles across hits a nuclear plant? People nearby might get radiation poisoning!! Let's ban nuclear plants." No they wouldn't. They'd be liquefied by the meteor impact. And the rest of us would surely want some nuclear power. Because that would, as they say, blot out the sun.)
I dunno about that. When I wanted to switch to green power, I went to the website of a green power producer and switched. The original multi-billion-dollar company still produces mostly coal and nuclear power, sure, but they no longer get my money, nor the money of a few hundred thousand other people that instead give it to the green company.
(I pay for said green company to place wind power on the grid equal to 100% of my use, though obviously the exact electromotive force that pushes electrons in and out of my house comes from wherever.)
Steve Jobs dying is the only short-term unexpected event that could crash the stock. Were that to happen, though, I would likely take the opportunity to buy more. It's not like he (and you, and I) won't die at some point anyway, and given his health conditions I concede that his may be sooner than later, and I think he's established a suitable succession plan to ensure continued success. Or, at least, continued 3-5 year success based on the probable roadmap he's laid forth. After that I'm less sure, but that gives me plenty of time to sell.
Sorry, but people arguing from a NIMBY perspective have never claimed that domestic solar power degrades home values. This is simply an attempt to attribute a completely illogical and unreasonable opposition to someone.
My HOA has a restriction against solar panels, with a justification/explanation that it would lower the values of nearby homes.
If driving is a right, and the ADA says you can't restrict rights based on a disability, why are the blind prevented from driving? Wouldn't the blind need to cause a few crashes (each) before their license could be revoked?
You really think the market will let Sony raise the console and game prices, when they are competing now against cell phones ("free" for gaming because they were bought for another purpose) with $1 games?
Do you really think Sony will try to raise their new console price over the ~$800 that the PS3 initially released for, when they are competing against Nintendo and Microsoft in the sub-$500 range?
If Sony tries those things to recoup this cost, it's the fault of the consumers who fall for it.
Wait a second - are you trying to dismiss the viability of solar power based on the notion that the sun might be blocked out from the sky?
Don't you think we'll have bigger problems to worry about in that case than the loss of energy to support 7 billion people? Perhaps we'll worry about our inability to grow crops to feed 7 billion people?
Once the design risks you can think of involve a cataclysm more extensive than the design, your design is good enough. This applies to solar power generation ("What if they block out the sun?!?"), nuclear power generation ("Can this plant withstand a direct nuclear strike without releasing radiation?!?"), or pretty much anything else.
Hence why I haven't sold my Apple stock (yet). It doesn't matter that I could cash out a 300% return. What matters is whether I think I can get more return by investing in Apple than by using the money to invest elsewhere. And, for everything I can see, keeping it in Apple will yield continued results.
It doesn't matter that you bought the server with your own cash. It's located at your business and being used for a business purpose. It's a business server. Having you A) claim ownership of the machine and B) resist anyone else having access of any sort should make your business very, very nervous about you.
What would you try to do if you quit or were fired? Would you pull the plug and take it home? Would you donate it to them at that time, making sure to give IT the password? What if you are hit by a truck (and your colleagues can't save you)?
You need to do two things: 1) Start talking to IT. It's great that they will let you manage the server and even maintain exclusive root access, but you should develop a transition plan (either to move the service to an existing IT server, or to transition maintenance of your machine to IT in the event you leave). 2) Put in an expense report and be paid for the hardware you bought. That way the ownership of the physical hardware will be clearly established (as theirs) and you won't be sued or arrested when you try to walk out the door with it later.
Yes, it's just scheduling software (for now), but seriously, if you proceed down the path you've chosen, all I see in your future is Terry Childs.
But if you want to raise a child and don't want to spawn, it takes $25k and two years and you better have no dings on your mental health record.
We have friends who always wanted to adopt, but they are in a different state working for a few years. There's no point in starting the process there, because when they move (and they'll plan to move), they lose all the money and all the progress and would have to start over.
So they just made their own baby. Of course they can take care of their own, but that means there's some un-adopted baby out there who just lost parents.
So 12.5 of these things would take about 182 square kilometers and produce the same power as Fukashima. Of course, Fukashima now takes about 1260 square kilometers and growing, so the solar farm seems pretty good against your choice of nuclear plant to compare...
Did you see the video of Anderson Cooper being attacked in Egypt? He's carrying a Flip camera in his hand. I think much of the grainy video you saw from that time was from Flip cameras. They are very discrete - much more so than any other sort of HD camera - and don't require you to have your smart phone with all your contacts, notes, personal information, etc., out in your hand where it can be grabbed by a passer by.
All those plants still exist because it's impossible to get permission to build a new plant today, and yet people still demand the electricity being generated by the old plants, and it's relatively easy to get a certificate to keep them open past their scheduled decommission date.
Make it possible, nay preferred, nay mandatory, that every plant with these fundamentally unsound design be replaced with a nuclear plant with a fundamentally safer* design, one that's been heavily vetted and can be used across the 'free' world. Then these old plants will go away and we'll all be safer.
* Safe is always relative. I don't think anyone can ever guarantee that a given plant won't melt down under heavy military bombardment or a large meteor strike, but a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and 15 meter tsunami should be easily manageable.
My wife was unemployed during that time, in Texas, and has a maximum credit rating. She didn't apply for unemployment though so she shouldn't be on any lists.
Not if the problem is a management re-interpretation of the patents. Gosling may have written a patent to cover a specific new case while dancing around a known, similar case. Oracle may now want their patent to cover both the intended case and the other case, where the other case better blocks Google. Gosling can explain that the patent was never intended to cover that case (which he knew about at the time) and that Oracle is misreading it. That's only actionable if Gosling ever deceived Oracle management, not if Oracle management was just too foolish or too malicious to clarify.
Actually, yeah, that's what I was thinking when I wrote that. Multicast seems like the natural successor to centralized television broadcast if the goal is to preserve interactive bandwidth for other applications.
So you want to watch next week's shows today? Sorry, they haven't finished post-production yet. You'll have to wait.
Okay... now they're done. Let's have 25 million people separately download them? Waste of internet bandwidth? Yes. Maybe we can use P2P to distribute the bandwidth. No, wait, that uses the same amount of bandwidth, just spread over more uploaders. Hmm...
Maybe we can use a centralized broadcast that can transmit it just once, let anyone who wants it cache it, then use that broadcast's bandwidth to transmit other things? And then people who miss the centralized broadcast can get a copy separately later? Let's do it!
You'd barely notice an extra nickel for a candy bar once a week, while someone who eats twenty a day would contribute an extra $365 a year towards the eventual public cost of their diabetes medication.
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Of course running a 50-year plant with all the sunk costs paid is "profitable". But that's only true if you consider all the costs "sunk". When you consider the parts of the plant that need to be replaced due to age and wear, suddenly the costs aren't all sunk and the plants aren't profitable.
Did you miss the posts from the guy who works in nuclear plant repair, and pointed out all the horrifying things he's seen wrong in plants that just don't get fixed?
You've missed the point. The old plants will not go away just because new ones are built.
How did I miss the point when I said "Make it ...mandatory, that every plant with these fundamentally unsound design be replaced"?
It's not economically valuable to run the old plant when, by choosing to do so, your company is sued into bankruptcy by the government, while you and your fellow executives are placed in prison.
I'm describing how we can fix a problem and make the world a safer place. I don't expect it to happen, because we live in a society where profit is more important than safety, for any sufficiently-large value of profit.
Woosh
Parent is merely pointing out that some notion of 'natural' is an ethereal thing open to wild range of interpretation and that the biosystem on Earth is dynamic and changing all the time.
Parent tried to make a joke about earth's "natural" state being pre-oxygenation of the atmosphere. Parent's joke failed.
You're trying to portray humans as insignificant specs in the grand scheme of a constantly-changing "nature", in an effort to justify taking no action to manage the large impacts humans are having on the environment. Your argument failed, too. Sorry.
I hope you are trying to be funny.
That should have been obvious from the rest of my post. I was dismissing criticism of solar power based on a larger catastrophe. The same applies to nuclear. ("OMG! What if a meteor 2 miles across hits a nuclear plant? People nearby might get radiation poisoning!! Let's ban nuclear plants." No they wouldn't. They'd be liquefied by the meteor impact. And the rest of us would surely want some nuclear power. Because that would, as they say, blot out the sun.)
I dunno about that. When I wanted to switch to green power, I went to the website of a green power producer and switched. The original multi-billion-dollar company still produces mostly coal and nuclear power, sure, but they no longer get my money, nor the money of a few hundred thousand other people that instead give it to the green company.
(I pay for said green company to place wind power on the grid equal to 100% of my use, though obviously the exact electromotive force that pushes electrons in and out of my house comes from wherever.)
Steve Jobs dying is the only short-term unexpected event that could crash the stock. Were that to happen, though, I would likely take the opportunity to buy more. It's not like he (and you, and I) won't die at some point anyway, and given his health conditions I concede that his may be sooner than later, and I think he's established a suitable succession plan to ensure continued success. Or, at least, continued 3-5 year success based on the probable roadmap he's laid forth. After that I'm less sure, but that gives me plenty of time to sell.
Sorry, but people arguing from a NIMBY perspective have never claimed that domestic solar power degrades home values. This is simply an attempt to attribute a completely illogical and unreasonable opposition to someone.
My HOA has a restriction against solar panels, with a justification/explanation that it would lower the values of nearby homes.
My anecdote beats your "never" and I win.
If driving is a right, and the ADA says you can't restrict rights based on a disability, why are the blind prevented from driving? Wouldn't the blind need to cause a few crashes (each) before their license could be revoked?
You really think the market will let Sony raise the console and game prices, when they are competing now against cell phones ("free" for gaming because they were bought for another purpose) with $1 games?
Do you really think Sony will try to raise their new console price over the ~$800 that the PS3 initially released for, when they are competing against Nintendo and Microsoft in the sub-$500 range?
If Sony tries those things to recoup this cost, it's the fault of the consumers who fall for it.
Are you implying that plants aren't natural?
Wait a second - are you trying to dismiss the viability of solar power based on the notion that the sun might be blocked out from the sky?
Don't you think we'll have bigger problems to worry about in that case than the loss of energy to support 7 billion people? Perhaps we'll worry about our inability to grow crops to feed 7 billion people?
Once the design risks you can think of involve a cataclysm more extensive than the design, your design is good enough. This applies to solar power generation ("What if they block out the sun?!?"), nuclear power generation ("Can this plant withstand a direct nuclear strike without releasing radiation?!?"), or pretty much anything else.
Unless that other schmuck also demands a renewable fuel source. Then the power company either loses business or builds another solar farm.
Hence why I haven't sold my Apple stock (yet). It doesn't matter that I could cash out a 300% return. What matters is whether I think I can get more return by investing in Apple than by using the money to invest elsewhere. And, for everything I can see, keeping it in Apple will yield continued results.
It doesn't matter that you bought the server with your own cash. It's located at your business and being used for a business purpose. It's a business server. Having you A) claim ownership of the machine and B) resist anyone else having access of any sort should make your business very, very nervous about you.
What would you try to do if you quit or were fired? Would you pull the plug and take it home? Would you donate it to them at that time, making sure to give IT the password? What if you are hit by a truck (and your colleagues can't save you)?
You need to do two things:
1) Start talking to IT. It's great that they will let you manage the server and even maintain exclusive root access, but you should develop a transition plan (either to move the service to an existing IT server, or to transition maintenance of your machine to IT in the event you leave).
2) Put in an expense report and be paid for the hardware you bought. That way the ownership of the physical hardware will be clearly established (as theirs) and you won't be sued or arrested when you try to walk out the door with it later.
Yes, it's just scheduling software (for now), but seriously, if you proceed down the path you've chosen, all I see in your future is Terry Childs.
http://www.ni.com/fpga/
But if you want to raise a child and don't want to spawn, it takes $25k and two years and you better have no dings on your mental health record.
We have friends who always wanted to adopt, but they are in a different state working for a few years. There's no point in starting the process there, because when they move (and they'll plan to move), they lose all the money and all the progress and would have to start over.
So they just made their own baby. Of course they can take care of their own, but that means there's some un-adopted baby out there who just lost parents.
So 12.5 of these things would take about 182 square kilometers and produce the same power as Fukashima. Of course, Fukashima now takes about 1260 square kilometers and growing, so the solar farm seems pretty good against your choice of nuclear plant to compare...
Did you see the video of Anderson Cooper being attacked in Egypt? He's carrying a Flip camera in his hand. I think much of the grainy video you saw from that time was from Flip cameras. They are very discrete - much more so than any other sort of HD camera - and don't require you to have your smart phone with all your contacts, notes, personal information, etc., out in your hand where it can be grabbed by a passer by.
All those plants still exist because it's impossible to get permission to build a new plant today, and yet people still demand the electricity being generated by the old plants, and it's relatively easy to get a certificate to keep them open past their scheduled decommission date.
Make it possible, nay preferred, nay mandatory, that every plant with these fundamentally unsound design be replaced with a nuclear plant with a fundamentally safer* design, one that's been heavily vetted and can be used across the 'free' world. Then these old plants will go away and we'll all be safer.
* Safe is always relative. I don't think anyone can ever guarantee that a given plant won't melt down under heavy military bombardment or a large meteor strike, but a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and 15 meter tsunami should be easily manageable.
My wife was unemployed during that time, in Texas, and has a maximum credit rating. She didn't apply for unemployment though so she shouldn't be on any lists.
Not if the problem is a management re-interpretation of the patents. Gosling may have written a patent to cover a specific new case while dancing around a known, similar case. Oracle may now want their patent to cover both the intended case and the other case, where the other case better blocks Google. Gosling can explain that the patent was never intended to cover that case (which he knew about at the time) and that Oracle is misreading it. That's only actionable if Gosling ever deceived Oracle management, not if Oracle management was just too foolish or too malicious to clarify.
Actually, yeah, that's what I was thinking when I wrote that. Multicast seems like the natural successor to centralized television broadcast if the goal is to preserve interactive bandwidth for other applications.
So you want to watch next week's shows today? Sorry, they haven't finished post-production yet. You'll have to wait.
Okay... now they're done. Let's have 25 million people separately download them? Waste of internet bandwidth? Yes. Maybe we can use P2P to distribute the bandwidth. No, wait, that uses the same amount of bandwidth, just spread over more uploaders. Hmm...
Maybe we can use a centralized broadcast that can transmit it just once, let anyone who wants it cache it, then use that broadcast's bandwidth to transmit other things? And then people who miss the centralized broadcast can get a copy separately later? Let's do it!
You'd barely notice an extra nickel for a candy bar once a week, while someone who eats twenty a day would contribute an extra $365 a year towards the eventual public cost of their diabetes medication.
That's okay, next week they'll announce a cure for arm- and leg-lessness, which regrows lost limbs!
Too bad that one will cost your first born...