So yes, CANDU is "old" and has been improved over the years. It is not the best. It is not the safest.
Sorry? In what way are CANDU6e and ACR-1000s "old", "not the best" and "not the safest"? They're quite new, are based on fantastic designs with nearly perfect safety records, and perform as well or better than any other designs ever put forth for nuclear reactors. I'm an American and I'll happily stand up and say that no US company has come up with a better design than either a CANDU6e reactor or an ACR-1000 and I challenge you to find anything in operation or under current construction that's a better design than either of those.
If we built nothing but ACR-1000s for all new power plants, we'd have 80 years of cheap, safe, clean power.
Putting any statement from one of the clowns from Tepco is just one step UNDER reporting a batboy headlinefrom weekly world news. Those guys are professionnal liers with ENORMOUS interest in asserting that no damage was done by the quake and all was fault of what they claim was a highly unprobably strong tsunami. If any rpoof arise from damage by the quake it would compromise all safety claims made toward japanese nuclear program.
In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite. Japanese requirements for seismic safety at that site were that it should be capable of withstanding an earthquake of about 7.75. The earthquake which hit the nuclear power plant was a 9. The best outcome for TEPCO in this scenario would be to simply be able to say "we met all safety requirements, but the quake was massively larger than anyone expected and so now we're doing everything we can to help". Instead, the plant actually withstood the quake and, what's more, actually shut itself down automatically during the quake. What happened next is what screws TEPCO (rightfully so).
As for those claiming that nuclear is safe because even with this accident everything is fine... just read a little more about all the food and radiation scandals going on. And realise that it's not over yet... For the comparison with Chernobyl... at least the Russian evacuated cities and got the plant under cocoon in less than 9 month, here the japanese are still in denial and only accept to acknowledge problems when they are cought red faced. Seriously, read a little more with carefull distance and neutrality on the topic from a wider panel of sources including ex-skf blog and fukushima diary...
Two people who were working at the nuclear power plant actually received more radiation than the "lowest one-year dose clearly linked to higher cancer risk" (http://xkcd.com/radiation/). Modeling and estimates say that between 100 and 1000 will have a somewhat shortened lifespan as a result of this disaster, but those are quite likely erring on the very high side considering that actual measurements of radiation in plants and soil within the exclusion zone have thus far been much lower than what existing models would suggest should be there. Most of what's actually been observed has been stuff that's very difficult for humans or animals to really get exposed to unless they're sitting there eating fist-fulls of dirt (due to the fact that the radioactive materials in question bond strongly to the stuff in the soil and thus aren't readily absorbed by plants of animals in normal contact with said soil).
This was a 40 year old power plant with known safety issues that neither the owners or the regulators took seriously. It was a 40 year old plant that got hit by an earthquake nobody involved in safety for the plant saw coming. It was a 40 year old plant that survived all of that and was only finally brought down by terrible design issues that led to small explosions and a fairly small release of radiation that may or may not result in a small number of people with slightly shorter lifespans. If that's the worst you've got against nuclear power plants, you should be dropping to your knees and praising Jesus for giving us the intellect to harness the power of the atom.
Coal kills thousands of people every year in mining accidents, plant accidents (mostly fires and explosions), and due to radiation exposure and heavy metal contamination of ground water from all the waste products. Hydro power plants have killed tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands in single accidents. Solar power kills a number of people every year due to various causes such as installers falling off rooftops and electrocutions. Electrocutions and falling deaths during installations also kill a number of people working on wind power every year. If all you people have are Three Mile Island (where nobody died and nobody received any significant radiation exposure) and Fukushima (where nobody died and two people received enough
"He said it would take more time and better technology to get to the melted fuel, most of which had fallen into an area the endoscope could not reach."
The current tools simply can't go where the fuel is, so they can't yet inspect it. They've confirmed there are no major breaches and are now looking over the information they've been able to gather to see what everything looks like inside. The fuel comment was a regret about the limitations of the tools they have to use, not so much a cause for alarm about anything being amiss.
I take a slightly different tact on that whole front. Based on just the satellite-collected data, I'm perfectly happy stipulating to the fact that there's been a small, observable, upward trend in the global average temperature over the past century. However, we lack sufficiently data with sufficient accuracy OR precision to say whether the upward trend has any significance in terms of differences in historic climate shifts. Certainly we've seen sudden, massive shifts in climate within human history (e.g. the Little Ice Age) which were obviously not caused by human activity. Further, many of those sudden, massive shifts don't show up in our typical climate measurement techniques. Sticking with the Little Ice Age, we have huge amounts of data from human accounts to say that the entire planet cooled significantly during this period. Yet when we look at indicators like glaciers, they don't tell us anything about it.
Let's repeat that: with our current climatology methods and techniques, we can't find a 300-year long mini ice age that human beings around the planet all observed, and it only happened 350 years ago.
So yeah, when someone tells me "omg we've NEVER seen temperatures change so fast and it's because people and carbon and stuff!", it'd be laughable if the ignorance weren't so sad. We can't track a 300 year long mini ice age using the best techniques we have for reconstructing historical global climate changes, and we can't do it with the cleanest, clearest, easiest data. New flash, boys and girls, we know Jack F. Shit about what kinds of sudden shifts happened thousands of years ago, let alone millions of years ago. Any sudden shifts - ANY sudden shifts - are lost in the data smoothing. Using everything we have today, there's zero chance we'd be able to detect the warming that's happened over the past 100 years from AD2300.
Why is that important? It means we have no idea if the warming we're observing is anything abnormal. We don't know what's happened before now, we barely know what's happening right now, and we don't know what actually drives changes in the global climate. If we knew how the global climate functioned, we'd be able to construct a functional model of the climate, pop in historical data from around the world, and get pretty accurate results about the next several years or decades following the last year of data entered. What we actually have are models where you have to fudge the data going in and/or add arbitrary constants within the model to make the results reasonably accurate for more than about a year (which is a joke). Even when arbitrary constants and false data are entered into the models we have to skew them in the direction we know they ought to go, their results become completely wrong within 18 months to two and a half or three years. In other words, they don't work because we don't build them correctly because we don't actually know what drives the planet's climate. And I'm not even getting into issues like tree ring data which totally throw off the whole thing.
So we don't have good data, we don't have a functional understanding of the Earth's climate, and we're supposed to believe that humans are destroying the planet and making it uninhabitable. Worse, we're supposed to sign on to proposals intended to alter the course of Earth's climate change with horrifyingly misguided geo-engineering schemes. My God, some people actually want us to sit down at the controls of the machine we don't understand but which we need in order to live and to start smashing buttons on it because they're convinced (without any real evidence) that we hit a button along the way that caused a problem.
This is sheer idiocy on a scale beyond imagination. It's like putting a small child at the controls of a 747 mid-flight and screaming at him to fix the plane. The result can only be a predictable and stupendous catastrophe in which an arrogant, stupid species causes its own extinction and the extinction of much of the rest of the organized life on this world.
We don't have 130 years on record. We have horribly incomplete records using inconsistent methods and untrained individuals doing the measuring and recording using non-standard devices and at inconsistent and non-standard times up until the 1970s when we started observing things scientifically from orbit with real tools.
The data we have from 1930-1970 is crap. The data we have from before that is vastly worse. Imagine measuring the temperature once since 1912 in a completely random part of the planet and claiming that's the global temperature for the world in the century from 1912 to present. Now take it a few steps worse than that and you have our temperature measuring for the ~500ish years prior to the 1920s. Take a few steps worse and you have our measurements for the ~5000 years before that. Rinse and repeat moving back for the life of the planet. Then compare all that data to the precise, exact measurements compiled into monthly or annual averages for the past ~30 years and raise unholy Hell about any differences which can be observed.
This is not science and it's not scientific, but the ferocity with which those who question it are attacked does bear a striking resemblance to many fundamentalist/extremist religious sects.
Precisely. The issue is not one of people being unwilling to face basic facts. When presented with the basic observed evidence, nearly all people agree that temperatures around the world have risen over the last century.
The problem comes when we go from "we've been observing temperatures at a bunch of locations for the past century and we're seeing an overall trend toward higher temperatures" to "humans are destroying the planet and everything's going to be destroyed and under water in just ten years unless we radically alter all human activity across the planet right this second". Those who question the methodology used to arrive at the second conclusion are typically labeled "deniers" or "idiots" or some other derogatory term and then ignored. Nevermind whatever evidence or valid questions they may present. And when difficult questions arise which cannot so easily be ignored, the two big fallbacks are the trusty "you're not a scientist, all the scientists alive all say the same thing and they're smart and you're dumb!" and the always popular "you're raising the bar again trying to apply the scientific method and actually expecting model results based on hypotheses we already know are right to produce results that remotely resemble reality and OMG WTF BBQ !!!11!1!"
I don't question what is observable. I question results from rigged models that can't function without someone hard-coding much of what leads to the results. I question the ideas behind such models. I question the methodology of core sampling. I question the removal of peaks and troughs for the vast majority of history and then comparing that data to the peaks and troughs observed today. I question the accuracy of measurements taken at monitoring stations where no one with any relevant training was charged with taking those measurements and when the time and tools were not standardized. I question the oversimplification of "oh look, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas in my lab where I don't have a functional ecosystem representative of Earth's, a magnetic field representative of Earth's, any representation of most of the kinds of fields, particles, and energy that interacts with the Earth, or any sort of separation between those things and my shitty lab experiment where I removed 99.999999999% of the things that drive the global climate and interact with said carbon dioxide".
Further, I resent the explicit claim that there's a "consensus" among scientists regarding either the source or the result of global climate change and I especially resent the implicit claim that the existence of such a consensus would -in any way- alter the validity of questions raised by any individual, regardless of their educational or employment background. Were we to take such stupidity seriously, people like Srnivsa Rmnujan (a poor child in India with no formal mathematics training who was given an advanced trigonometry book at 10, mastered it by himself by age 12, and went on to do tremendous amounts of new work of his own) and Albert Einstein (a Swiss patent clerk who kinda discovered much of modern physics) would never have been allowed to contribute anything to human society and we, as a species, would be vastly poorer for it. When -anyone-, regardless of their background or qualifications, makes valid points and raises valid questions, anyone interested in scientific truth will listen and will raise their voice to make those points heard and to get real answers to those questions.
I've asked many AGWites what evidence would disprove AGW. The most common answer I get is "nothing, because it's already been proven." Folks, if nothing will disprove what you're claiming, it ain't science; doesn't matter where you got it from. Think about it.
But again, I don't care whether John Huntsman sits at home reading science journals or whether he sits at home thinking about how God created the world 6,000 years ago. As a geek, I care about the policies he'll put in place which will either help or hurt things like science education. If the guy thinks Jesus rode dinosaurs to school, I don't care. If he thinks we should be teaching that in science classes around the country, I have a problem with it. I want to know what a candidate will do if elected to help or harm the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the natural world; not what they think. What goes on inside their head isn't of any concern to me whatsoever and doesn't affect me or anyone else.
I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you, but that's the unstated risk one takes when one lends money denominated in the currency of the debtor nation. Were we not the holders of the world's reserve currency, we would not be able to get away with what you're describing. Be that as it may, China (and everyone else lending us money) has implicitly agreed to take the face value of the currency as repayment for the debt and thus we're not technically defaulting.
It's also kind of unfair to say that since the US Federal government controls fiscal policies (i.e. spending) and the Federal Reserve Bank (which is more or less an independent and separate animal from the former) controls the monetary policies driving the US Dollar's inflationary loss of value.
The models are garbage because they're based on terribly incomplete science. That's not the fault of science, but rather the fault of arrogant idiots and grant hounds who need to show extraordinary results to continue bringing in cash so they can show more extraordinary results.
There's nothing anti-science about recognizing when a scientific pursuit - such as understanding the mechanisms that drive the global climate - is in its infancy and requires significant more study before definitive, policy-driving conclusions can be reached. It isn't about being perfect to the day; it's about being accurate enough to know that you have a solid understanding of the fundamental principles behind the process or system you're describing.
Einstein was a scientist; and a good one. Its because of his work that GPS satellites work as well as they do. If he settled for the kinds of results many climate "scientists" do when they warn of dire consequences if we don't make major policy changes, we'd have GPS satellites whose effective resolution would rapidly deteriorate the moment they got into orbit and you'd be sitting here screaming about how I'm a Luddite when I point out that the GPS satellites put in orbit 6 months ago can't even help me determine what state I'm in.
Good science based on understanding of fundamental, driving principles of nature makes specific, accurate predictions. There exists no climate model which does that. The ones that work the best are the ones which have huge amounts of data excluded and replaced with false information and hard, arbitrary constants to help them get closer to historically accurate climate representations. They don't function based on the principles driving the global climate and thus the conclusions drawn from them are worthless.
From the standpoint of any decent scientist, they're absolute shit.
Please direct me to the model for either the world economy or world climate that gives me a 24-month forecast with 90% accuracy (without fudging the inputs, please).
If your model doesn't predict the future, it's shite and it should never be used for policy decisions. Open systems like the world climate and the world economy are too complex for currently available modeling techniques to accurately capture and process necessary data to achieve a high-confidence understanding. We don't even have many of the inputs. We certainly don't have nearly all the interactions. We don't even have a high-level understanding of the processes driving either system. Hence, we don't have models that aren't "shot in the dark, hope this works" or "oh look, if I just pretend these values were actually this, I can sort of get accurate results at the end!"
Today's climate/economic models: x + 5 = 14. Model predicts x = 10, therefore x + 5 = 14^D^D^D 15.
And even Ron Paul's supporters have a disturbing tendency to act in this fashion. Their Modus - at least the one's I've spoken or written with is to first declare that Paul is our only hope. Then when asked for details, one gets almost hysterical attacks. In one case, after noting that I wasn't getting anything real but instead personal attacks, I get replies that were mostly profanity, and one that called me a liar and I wasn't getting personal attacks. So all the "Libertarians posing as Republican's have to offer is anger.
I think that they overplayed their "strength".
I think it's terrible that there are so many irrational people supporting Ron Paul. It allows people to write him off as a crackpot when he gets 90 seconds in a one or two hour debate (literally, this actually happened) to explain all of his proposed policies and ideas, and then you see hysterical online reactions from a vocal minority of unstable and/or immature fanatics who can't/won't rationally discuss their favorite candidate with people trying to make an informed choice.
I can tell you that there are many supporters of Ron Paul who are perfectly reasonable, intelligent people who are capable of having a rational discussion about him and his positions. He's not a messiah or a super hero, but rather a pretty smart guy with a lot of ideas which are quite different from the typical Washington DC politician stuff we're used to seeing. I think he has an excellent grasp of cause and effect in the world and some really common sense solutions to major problems. What he doesn't have is a very good delivery that's easily compressed and digested by people who haven't already spent a lot of time researching background information on the topic and digging into Paul's actual thinking on the subject. It makes for some ridiculous soundbites that get air time and combines with some fanatical idiots' stupid actions and statements serving only to discredit him.
There's always been a libertarian wing of the GOP. That's the section that rails against things like the USA PATRIOT ACT, TSA zapping people with cancer walls, and other such things like that. They work well with the fiscal conservatives of the GOP and often clash with the social conservatives (due to the fact that the libertarians aren't interested in a Department of Jesus, Morals, and Prayer to enforce the laws of God upon the people at gunpoint). They also work well with some liberals/progressives in that they don't believe we need a 20 million-man military deployed across the Earth in full readiness to take down the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with extreme prejudice while repeatedly cycling between destroying and rebuilding every nation that disagrees with us.
So in any event, you shouldn't judge the entire lot of Paul supporters (or for that matter, Paul himself) by the actions of some really stupid, counter-productive fanatics. If you're tired of the typical Washington games being played and at least want someone who's open, honest, and consistent about what he believes and what he wants to do, take a look at what Paul has to say. It'll be more long-winded than something Newt or Mitt can run through, but that's at least partially because it has actual substance to it. You probably won't find your messiah in Paul, but you might just find that he can make a lot of sense if you keep an open mind and try to see where he's coming from on a given issue.
1) Without proof one way or the other, it's unfair to judge a candidates' possible, personal view on a subject. Besides, who really cares what they believe for themselves? I care how that person will govern. I'll vote for a guy who believes the Earth is 6000 years old if he's got solid positions on all the important issues and won't screw up the education system with his backwards personal ideology.
2) Unless your state is in New Hampshire, you'd best be ready to hit the write-in if you want to cast your ballot for Huntsman. After he finishes in about 4th or 5th there after living there for the past year and dumping everything his campaign has into the state, he's done. Besides, he has about as much appear as a duck and no chance at all of defeating President Obama in the general election.
The problem with Ron Paul is he doesn't articulate his positions very well and so they sometimes come off sounding like total crackpot stuff. In truth, when you actually look at what he's saying, there's really nothing there that doesn't make any sense. You may not agree that things will actually play out the way he claims (and you'll be right a certain percentage of the time because nobody gets everything right), but some of the stuff he's said before that sounded really wacky and stupid actually came to be. He was slamming Fannie and Freddie in 2003 (and earlier too, but REALLY hard in 2003) for their role in creating a housing bubble that would inevitably burst. 2003 he saw that and people (especially in Congress, especially Frank and others in that circle) were literally laughing at him. "Oh there goes crazy Ron Paul again, talkin' about bubbles and stuff and claiming housing prices are going to tank and people are going to lose their houses and banks are going to be in big trouble. Is that guy crazy or what?!"
When I see stuff like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S3lXDOQ7ec and this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGDisyWkIBM I can't help but think that even the stuff he says today that still doesn't really sit right with me might actually end up being right. He's got such a grasp of how things function that he's able to model (mentally) where we are today and where it's leading us toward tomorrow. Don't just judge what he says by the soundbites that make it through the mics at events. At one of the first major GOP 2012 debates, he was allowed to speak for 90 seconds in a one or two hour debate. Just how great would you sound if you had 90 seconds to tell the world about all your political thoughts and ideas? If you hear him say something that makes him sound like he's from another planet, go and look up more background information about the subject and see if there's video of him sitting down and having a chance to really talk about it. For me, doing that has cleared up 9 out of 10 seemingly wacky position statements. And like I said, who wants to be the Barny Frank laughing at him on the 10th one considering Ron Paul's history on calling things?
Really? Trading openly with nations around the world and ceasing the practice of sanctions, bribes, and bombs to achieve political goals = total isolationism?
Is that some kinda 'tard logic?
The fact that an individual doesn't believe separating every country in the world into the categories of Bribe, Bomb, or Sanction does not indicate that said person is not in favor of engaging with those nations. Believe it or not, there are other ways to interact. You don't have to bribe countries to do what you want with foreign aid. You don't have to sanction countries who are doing things you don't like. You don't have to bomb and invade countries you really don't like. Looking for other options while seeking open trade with every country on Earth does NOT make one an isolationist.
Nor does it make one an isolationist to say that we probably don't need military troops stationed in over 150 countries around the world. 150 countries. Can you even name that many? Tell me, if Ron Paul said we should only have soldiers stationed in 75 countries around the world, would you then call him a half-isolationist? It's unbelievable to me when I hear these morons in the media and in the Republican Party talking about a guy who wants to open dialog with countries where we have no relations, open trade with countries we currently sanction and embargo, and stop interfering in the internal decision making of supposed allies as if he's an isolationist.
To me, an isolationist is someone who pisses off the entire world by bossing around friends, bribing the "friends" who wouldn't listen to the bossing around to make them do as told, funding both sides of wars (Palestinians + Arabs + Israelies), propping up dictators in countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran of yesteryear, etc, slapping sanctions and embargoes on all kinds of countries and groups around the world, and stationing troops all over the planet (particularly in places they're not wanted). That's someone who's ensuring that nearly every relationship we have is a strained and unhealthy one filled with mutual distrust and anger.
While there are some nutters who actually think we'd be better off defaulting right now (there's a point where we would be, but we aren't near there yet), the entire discussion is actually moot. Ron Paul and others who were strongly against raising the debt ceiling were not insisting that the United States default on its debt obligations. In fact, the US Federal government has plenty of income year-round which would have more than covered all debt obligations and minimal Federal operations. Things like national parks and touristy stuff would have been closed and Federal contractors likely would have been in the dark in terms of payment for a bit as funds trickled in and a new funding model was worked through, but there was NEVER any danger of the US being unable to service its debt simply because of a vote against raising the debt ceiling.
The absolute bullshit spewed by the media on the subject was completely ridiculous. It had no more validity than claiming the US could default on its debt this coming Thursday at 1pm. Could it? Sure. The Dept of the Treasury could simply refuse to service our debt obligations regardless of the availability of funds. It could have chosen to do the same after a Congressional vote against raising the debt ceiling. Or it could pay those debt obligations - an option it's never lost.
As for understanding foreign policy and debt obligations, I think you're misunderstanding things a bit. First of all, the creditors take a hit when a sovereign nation defaults, but the system adjusts and life goes on. Nations too deep into debt are generally better off defaulting than going the IMF/WB route (see also: South America for both sides of how that coin falls). Greece may have actually reached the point where a sovereign default would do that country a lot of good after some horribly painful short-term realignment of national funding and spending. If you believe sovereign default harms trade in any appreciable manner, you're terribly wrong and there's enormous amounts of history to back up that position. It's short term pain (lots of it) for the citizens living there, a period of readjustment, and then typically some excellent economic growth. If properly managed, that puts you on the fast track to success in the long term. The IMF and WB can help a moderately indebted nation chart a path toward fiscal responsibility. What they cannot do is take a nation with crushing sovereign debt and bring it into solvency and economic prosperity. There are times where austerity makes more sense and times where default makes more sense. The US is a case where austerity still makes more sense. Virtually no one has seriously argued otherwise beyond some ignorant goofballs in the tiniest of minority opinion blocks.
Ron Paul doesn't believe that the citizens of his district should be paying income taxes to the Federal government. Ergo, as the representative of those people, he does everything he can to bring as much of their Federal tax dollars back to them as possible. He's never hidden that. He's never claimed to do anything but that.
And as for earmarks themselves, he's absolutely 100% correct that they're completely proper and should be the normal course. The alternative is to simply hand out enormous checks and let someone over on the executive side decide what money goes where. That's not what the US Constitution says. That's not what's supposed to happen. Not a single dollar of Federal government appropriations should be spent without the US Congress stipulating exactly where it's to be spent and on what.
You put Ron Paul in the position to do what he wants and you won't have to worry about the people of his district getting their Federal tax monies returned to them in all sorts of odd ways. Why? Because he'll ensure that money stays there in the first place (along with every other district). The way things work today is that the Federal government takes money from your paycheck and then sends some of it back your way in projects that your Congresscritters managed to get stuck into all sorts of laws. If Ron Paul had his way, the Federal government wouldn't be taking that money, so those weird Federal projects wouldn't be happening. Instead, you'd have local taxes paying for local projects which are actually needed and desired by local communities. Don't need fancy new bus shelters (or the citizens living there don't want to pay for them?) Then they won't get them.
The earmarks thing is a very common right-wing criticism that really just doesn't make sense. Paul would gladly see the spending (even on his own earmarked projects) stopped along with the taxes (and deficits) that feed that spending. But if the taxes are going to be levied and the deficits are going to be run up, and the spending is going to happen no matter what, he's going to ensure that the people he represents get as much of their own money back as possible. There's absolutely nothing inconsistent about the position.
I couldn't have said it better myself. The people who think we're able to accurately model the world economy are the same ones who think we're able to model world climate. Maybe, one day, with enough understanding of how all the major underlying principles work - both independently and interacting with one another - we'll be able to model either of them. Until that time, we're young children standing in the reactor control room at a nuclear reactor watching lights flicker on and off and trying to make sense of it all.
The worst possible thing we can do is to start hitting buttons when we don't have a clue what any of this stuff means or what the consequences are of hitting those buttons (be they Fed monetary policy or geo-engineering).
Frankly, it's all symptoms of a classic problem of human arrogance and ego. The possibility that we may one day have the capacity to understand a complex system like the world economy or world climate does not give us any moral authority or inherent competence in understanding it today; nor does it give us license to try screwing with it to "fix" what we (in our infinite ignorance) perceive as problems in the system.
You'll find that you generally get a much better result when you approach something like the world economy with game theory than you do with any supposedly "scientific" Keynesian economics models. It doesn't mean you don't keep trying; it means you don't base policy decisions on broken models you already know aren't worth a damn just because you WANT to believe we SHOULD be able to construct accurate models.
Oh yes, because the currently prevailing ideology regarding economics is working out so well. Hey, how's that Federal Reserve working out for everyone? Isn't it cool to not have any more boom and bust cycles?
What's that? The boom of the 20s? The Great Depression? The boom of the late 40s? Stagflation in the 70s? Major crashes in the 80s? A tech boom in the 90s? A tech bubble crash in the early 2000s? A housing boom/bubble in the mid 2000s? The worst worldwide economic collapse since the Great Depression with lingering unemployment which will likely not allow us to return to normal employment numbers for a decade or more beginning in 2007/2008?
Wait a minute... maybe (and I'm just speculating here)... maybe the "experts" on economics from the last hundred or so years DIDN'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT.
Yeah, you're right - we shouldn't be listening to crackpots like Ron Paul. We should be listening to geniuses like Ben Bernanke who've done so well for all of us thus far.
The RBMK-1000 reactors in operation after Chernobyl were all retrofitted with a number of additional safety features. As part of the retrofitting, the positive void coefficient was significantly lowered, meaning the reaction rate increase in the worst-case scenario is drastically reduced. It's still a terrible design as nuclear power plants go, but again, the issue with the Chernobyl reactor wasn't simply the design, but a combination of that, the few existing safety features being disabled, the modifications made by Soviet scientists to the reactor core, and the experiment they were running.
Even your typical RMBK-1000 reactor could not have done what the Chernobyl reactor did because nobody using nuclear reactors at power plants would -ever- do what was done at Chernobyl. Again, Chernobyl was NOT a civilian nuclear power plant. It was not designed to be. It was not run like one. Its "accident" was not the result of normal (or even atypical) operations at one. This is why is beyond absurd when people try to bring up Chernobyl in discussions about nuclear power plants.
The good news is, I immediately know that I can run circles around anyone who bring up Chernobyl in a discussion about nuclear power because they don't know the first goddamn thing about what they're talking about. Nobody who has any understanding of the design and history of nuclear power plants would ever bring up Chernobyl in a discussion about safety.
And I'm certainly not trying to claim that nuclear power is some kind of magically safe and wonderful thing handed to us from a mountaintop by the hand of God himself. It takes proper planning, design, and execution to build a nuclear power plant which is passively safe (meaning everyone running the thing runs away during a natural or man-made disaster and nothing bad happens with the reactor(s)), and despite the extra expenses involved, I don't believe we should EVER build a nuclear power plant which isn't passively safe. That said, when they're built with at least basic concepts of safety in mind, nuclear power plants are VASTLY safer than any other major source of power we've ever imagined. I'll take a retrofitted RBMK-1000 over your typical coal-fire plant any day of the week. Hell, I'd rather live next to one of those than downstream from a hydro plant. Accidents at those things have killed hundreds of thousands of people in just hours. Coal-fire plant accidents have killed hundreds at a time and left vast area (entire towns) uninhabitable (to say nothing of the amount of heavy metals and radioactive materials they release on a GOOD day).
I haven't yet met a person who's really studied the issue of power plant safety who hasn't agreed that nuclear power ends up being the cleanest, safest, most cost-effective source of power that actually works at the scales needed for the human race to function in modern society. The old-school Greenpeacers even came to that conclusion, which is probably why the new kids over there actually get sent out with protest signs depicting Hiroshima-style nuclear explosions to talk about nuclear power. Once you know how these things work, you just can't buy into the FUD and outright bullshit of the protestors. Once you have a grasp of the physics taking place, it just becomes terribly obvious what can and cannot happen at these power plants. And what you discover is that the news media, protestors, and your average Joe Sixpack don't have the first clue what they're talking about when they try to (and unfortunately do) influence policy decisions with lawmakers.
When we saw Fukushima unfolding, just about everyone was shocked by what was happening. People who understood the design of nuclear power plants knew it wasn't half as dire as the hysterical crap thrown out by the news media (Bill Nye? How the F do you have a JOB?!), but were still surprised that things got out of control (within the limits of the physics of reactors) so quickly and easily. Once the facts came out about these particular designs and the decisions ma
Chernobyl is an unfair comparison/example to make. Chernobyl wasn't primarily a nuclear power plant. Oh, it put electricity into the grid, but only because it was the easiest option to get rid of the 'waste' energy. The Chernobyl reactor which had a disastrous "accident" was a highly experiment modification of an already extremely dangerous design (the Soviet RBMK-1000) whose primary purpose was high-risk nuclear reactor experimentation and whose secondary purpose was refinement of nuclear weapons materials.
When the "accident" happened, they were running an experiment to essentially see what the reactor's stress limits were. Because the few, pitiful safety systems built into that monstrosity would have hindered the experiment, they were disabled. So you have a terrible design (no passive safety to speak of, instead it was a high-positive void coefficient design), the few available safety systems were disabled, no passive safety built in, the reactor was modified to do extremely dangerous experiments, and one such experiment was being run to push the thing to (and beyond) its limits without any safety systems whatsoever.
This is not a civilian nuclear power plant and no western design in history - from the very first western plant to the latest and greatest available today - COULD have had the kind of accident that one did. Even in the case of the Fukushima plant, you had known (as in known for about ~40 years) design issues for which there had been an available fix (available for something like ~37 years) from the manufacturer, you had a plant operator who didn't care to fix the known safety issue, you had a complicit government unwilling to force them to fix it, and when a massive earthquake (beyond anyone's expectations) hit, the reactor did exactly what it was supposed to do and it was only the resulting tsunami which actually caused problems for the reactor. Nevermind the fact that the tsunami killed vast numbers of people and annihilated vast swaths of crops and property; the only story anyone cared about was a nuclear reactor that basically just became unusable and in which one person died.
For a plant that's correctly maintained, Three Mile Island is about the worst potential disaster you can have. I say "worst" partially in jest since nobody died and modeling/studies of people who would have received the highest (extremely small) doses of radiation from the disaster have consistently showed zero increase in radiation-related health issues. In Fukushima, some radioactive material was released. Thus far, the very few actual soil, plant, and wildlife samples taken from the exclusion zone have shown exactly what anyone familiar with this technology would expect: the really "hot" stuff is already mostly gone, the most dangerous of the long-lasting stuff is NOT making its way into groundwater or plant or animal life (due to the way it bonds with various soil components), and what's left is very unlikely to cause any statistically significant (possibly even measurable) increase in health issues.
Basically, you'll get more radiation exposure from taking a 747 from NY to London while eating a couple bananas. The studies which dispute that information are all (at least, all the ones I've seen) based on models with a LOT of assumptions built in about radioactive material amounts, compositions, and points of escape from containment. All the actual measurements I've seen from Fukushima show that people could be living within the exclusion zone right now and almost certainly never know the difference. Much of what's talked about in terms of the radiation released is absolute FUD (like the geniuses claiming that East coast US milk was irradiated by Fukushima fallout).
To my way of thinking, we simply need to replace all the old reactors with shiny new ones ASAP. Personally, I'd prefer the ARC-1000s. They're reasonably priced, safe-by-design, a beautiful hybrid light/heavy water design allowing maximum fuel flexibility and performance, and they'll pump out quite a bit of juice. The nice thing is
Cheaper.... to construct? Certainly. To operate on a per/TWh generated over the lifetime of the plant basis? Not even close. In fact, it's a joke.
Let's talk about the fact that nuclear power is SAFER (as in less deaths per TWh generated) than wind power. Oh, you didn't think about that one, did ya?
Well, that's a bit more than one month's rent of a 1 bedroom apartment in SF, NYC, or DC. Not sure what you'd do for housing for the other 11 months, nor what you'd do for food, clothing, transportation, or just about anything else. I spend $2000/yr in gasoline. There was a time where I spent $2000/yr at Starbucks (a habit I've since kicked to the curb). That $163/month would pay for about 3/4 of a trip to the grocery store for two weeks worth of food.
To give you a middle-of-the-road idea of how things are currently in the US, $30,000 gross annual salary is enough for one (maybe two if you stretch it) people to live in an ok apartment (nothing fancy, not a house unless you're in the middle of nowhere), feed yourself somewhat decent food (probably Safeway specials, certainly not fresh, locally grown, organic stuff), get yourself back and forth to work everyday in an ok (likely used, but running-alright car), and put ok (nothing fancy or name-brand) clothes on your back. At $50,000/yr, you can have a decent apartment or small house in an ok to decent area, feed yourself slightly healthier stuff, have a slightly newer and more reliable vehicle for transportation, and probably have a kid enjoy those things as well.
Now, some people survive (I wouldn't call it "living") on less than that. Assuming you have a wife and kid and you're making $15,000/yr, you're living in a slum or government-subsidized dump in the middle of gangland, living off the McDonald's dollar menu for your 1-2 meals a day (though your kid might actually get 3 meals a day when their drug infested hellhole of an inner city public "school" (gang recruitment complex) is in session), likely walking or taking the bus (when you can afford it and if a bus route exists where you are) to most places, and pretty much are in a miserable pile of shit every single day of your life. You and your family manage to survive at this level of income only by the grace of a steady flow of local, state, and Federal tax dollars providing support for some/most of your extremely basic shelter and food needs and your child likely never receives the tools to break out of this cycle of poverty.
So how bad would things have to be for US citizens to live off $163/month? I invite you to explore that question while watching the classic Mel Gibson film "Mad Max". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079501/
I think you'll find an accurate representation of the kind of society you would witness if average folks in the US were ever forced to exist at that income level.
Will Newegg get me an identical (and I mean right down to the EXACT model if not the same manufacturing run) replacement drive in my hands on site within 4 hours, 5 years after I bought the thing from them? Will Newegg replace an entire enclosure and all its drives extremely quickly and assist on site with migration if the device(s) sold reach an unacceptable level of hardware failures?
NetApp's never held a gun to my head. They offer storage, software, and services at a price. If you believe their price is not worthwhile, check with their direct competitors like EMC* (Note: please consult your cardiologist prior to doing this). If you don't think any of those vendors are giving you the combination of products and services which give you proper value, you're perfectly free to dial up Newegg, buy whatever you want from them, and let your career and your reputation hang on the hope that it all works out for you.
I love Newegg for my personal stuff and when I worked at a small consulting company we sometimes even bought stuff from there (as opposed to our regular distributors) depending on part availability, price, etc. Would I put my paycheck on the line to save my employer some money? No; I'll go through the RFQ process dealing with enterprise-level vendors, present my own analysis to the higher-ups regarding what we actually need versus what would be nice to have, and end up with the level of service and support that enterprise customers need. We sometimes need ridiculous things. When [insert enterprise server vendor here] has a bad group of DIMMs from [insert memory manufacturer here], they don't make me send them the DIMMS one-by-one as they go bad when 6 have gone bad in one box already and more are continuing to go bad and they don't make me sit around waiting for shipping, diagnostics, processing, etc. Instead, they say "yeah, sounds like a bad batch. We're REALLY sorry those aren't working properly, and we've got a replacement set of DIMMS for that entire order being overnighted right now with a return label enclosed for all the DIMMs in the bad group."
Add up the time I'd spend dealing with Newegg, shipping, going back and forth with them for RMAs of individual DIMMs, customer downtime/slowdowns (as capacity dwindles as boxes rotate out of the cluster for repeated DIMM replacements), and engineer time testing everything over and over again to try and weed out everything that's actually going bad, then put that up against the initial savings I'd get for getting the RAM/HDDs/etc from Newegg vs the enterprise vendor. My time costs the company quite a bit of money, as do the opportunity costs which arise when my time is eaten by trivial matters like RMAs. It may not be worthwhile for YOU to buy a $250 for $1000 from an enterprise level vendor, but I can ASSURE you that it's plenty worth it in the long run for a great many businesses.
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So yes, CANDU is "old" and has been improved over the years. It is not the best. It is not the safest.
Sorry? In what way are CANDU6e and ACR-1000s "old", "not the best" and "not the safest"? They're quite new, are based on fantastic designs with nearly perfect safety records, and perform as well or better than any other designs ever put forth for nuclear reactors. I'm an American and I'll happily stand up and say that no US company has come up with a better design than either a CANDU6e reactor or an ACR-1000 and I challenge you to find anything in operation or under current construction that's a better design than either of those.
If we built nothing but ACR-1000s for all new power plants, we'd have 80 years of cheap, safe, clean power.
[citation needed]
Putting any statement from one of the clowns from Tepco is just one step UNDER reporting a batboy headlinefrom weekly world news. Those guys are professionnal liers with ENORMOUS interest in asserting that no damage was done by the quake and all was fault of what they claim was a highly unprobably strong tsunami. If any rpoof arise from damage by the quake it would compromise all safety claims made toward japanese nuclear program.
In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite. Japanese requirements for seismic safety at that site were that it should be capable of withstanding an earthquake of about 7.75. The earthquake which hit the nuclear power plant was a 9. The best outcome for TEPCO in this scenario would be to simply be able to say "we met all safety requirements, but the quake was massively larger than anyone expected and so now we're doing everything we can to help". Instead, the plant actually withstood the quake and, what's more, actually shut itself down automatically during the quake. What happened next is what screws TEPCO (rightfully so).
As for those claiming that nuclear is safe because even with this accident everything is fine... just read a little more about all the food and radiation scandals going on. And realise that it's not over yet... For the comparison with Chernobyl... at least the Russian evacuated cities and got the plant under cocoon in less than 9 month, here the japanese are still in denial and only accept to acknowledge problems when they are cought red faced. Seriously, read a little more with carefull distance and neutrality on the topic from a wider panel of sources including ex-skf blog and fukushima diary...
Two people who were working at the nuclear power plant actually received more radiation than the "lowest one-year dose clearly linked to higher cancer risk" (http://xkcd.com/radiation/). Modeling and estimates say that between 100 and 1000 will have a somewhat shortened lifespan as a result of this disaster, but those are quite likely erring on the very high side considering that actual measurements of radiation in plants and soil within the exclusion zone have thus far been much lower than what existing models would suggest should be there. Most of what's actually been observed has been stuff that's very difficult for humans or animals to really get exposed to unless they're sitting there eating fist-fulls of dirt (due to the fact that the radioactive materials in question bond strongly to the stuff in the soil and thus aren't readily absorbed by plants of animals in normal contact with said soil).
This was a 40 year old power plant with known safety issues that neither the owners or the regulators took seriously. It was a 40 year old plant that got hit by an earthquake nobody involved in safety for the plant saw coming. It was a 40 year old plant that survived all of that and was only finally brought down by terrible design issues that led to small explosions and a fairly small release of radiation that may or may not result in a small number of people with slightly shorter lifespans. If that's the worst you've got against nuclear power plants, you should be dropping to your knees and praising Jesus for giving us the intellect to harness the power of the atom.
Coal kills thousands of people every year in mining accidents, plant accidents (mostly fires and explosions), and due to radiation exposure and heavy metal contamination of ground water from all the waste products. Hydro power plants have killed tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands in single accidents. Solar power kills a number of people every year due to various causes such as installers falling off rooftops and electrocutions. Electrocutions and falling deaths during installations also kill a number of people working on wind power every year. If all you people have are Three Mile Island (where nobody died and nobody received any significant radiation exposure) and Fukushima (where nobody died and two people received enough
"He said it would take more time and better technology to get to the melted fuel, most of which had fallen into an area the endoscope could not reach."
The current tools simply can't go where the fuel is, so they can't yet inspect it. They've confirmed there are no major breaches and are now looking over the information they've been able to gather to see what everything looks like inside. The fuel comment was a regret about the limitations of the tools they have to use, not so much a cause for alarm about anything being amiss.
I take a slightly different tact on that whole front. Based on just the satellite-collected data, I'm perfectly happy stipulating to the fact that there's been a small, observable, upward trend in the global average temperature over the past century. However, we lack sufficiently data with sufficient accuracy OR precision to say whether the upward trend has any significance in terms of differences in historic climate shifts. Certainly we've seen sudden, massive shifts in climate within human history (e.g. the Little Ice Age) which were obviously not caused by human activity. Further, many of those sudden, massive shifts don't show up in our typical climate measurement techniques. Sticking with the Little Ice Age, we have huge amounts of data from human accounts to say that the entire planet cooled significantly during this period. Yet when we look at indicators like glaciers, they don't tell us anything about it.
Let's repeat that: with our current climatology methods and techniques, we can't find a 300-year long mini ice age that human beings around the planet all observed, and it only happened 350 years ago.
So yeah, when someone tells me "omg we've NEVER seen temperatures change so fast and it's because people and carbon and stuff!", it'd be laughable if the ignorance weren't so sad. We can't track a 300 year long mini ice age using the best techniques we have for reconstructing historical global climate changes, and we can't do it with the cleanest, clearest, easiest data. New flash, boys and girls, we know Jack F. Shit about what kinds of sudden shifts happened thousands of years ago, let alone millions of years ago. Any sudden shifts - ANY sudden shifts - are lost in the data smoothing. Using everything we have today, there's zero chance we'd be able to detect the warming that's happened over the past 100 years from AD2300.
Why is that important? It means we have no idea if the warming we're observing is anything abnormal. We don't know what's happened before now, we barely know what's happening right now, and we don't know what actually drives changes in the global climate. If we knew how the global climate functioned, we'd be able to construct a functional model of the climate, pop in historical data from around the world, and get pretty accurate results about the next several years or decades following the last year of data entered. What we actually have are models where you have to fudge the data going in and/or add arbitrary constants within the model to make the results reasonably accurate for more than about a year (which is a joke). Even when arbitrary constants and false data are entered into the models we have to skew them in the direction we know they ought to go, their results become completely wrong within 18 months to two and a half or three years. In other words, they don't work because we don't build them correctly because we don't actually know what drives the planet's climate. And I'm not even getting into issues like tree ring data which totally throw off the whole thing.
So we don't have good data, we don't have a functional understanding of the Earth's climate, and we're supposed to believe that humans are destroying the planet and making it uninhabitable. Worse, we're supposed to sign on to proposals intended to alter the course of Earth's climate change with horrifyingly misguided geo-engineering schemes. My God, some people actually want us to sit down at the controls of the machine we don't understand but which we need in order to live and to start smashing buttons on it because they're convinced (without any real evidence) that we hit a button along the way that caused a problem.
This is sheer idiocy on a scale beyond imagination. It's like putting a small child at the controls of a 747 mid-flight and screaming at him to fix the plane. The result can only be a predictable and stupendous catastrophe in which an arrogant, stupid species causes its own extinction and the extinction of much of the rest of the organized life on this world.
Humans are dumb.
We don't have 130 years on record. We have horribly incomplete records using inconsistent methods and untrained individuals doing the measuring and recording using non-standard devices and at inconsistent and non-standard times up until the 1970s when we started observing things scientifically from orbit with real tools.
The data we have from 1930-1970 is crap. The data we have from before that is vastly worse. Imagine measuring the temperature once since 1912 in a completely random part of the planet and claiming that's the global temperature for the world in the century from 1912 to present. Now take it a few steps worse than that and you have our temperature measuring for the ~500ish years prior to the 1920s. Take a few steps worse and you have our measurements for the ~5000 years before that. Rinse and repeat moving back for the life of the planet. Then compare all that data to the precise, exact measurements compiled into monthly or annual averages for the past ~30 years and raise unholy Hell about any differences which can be observed.
This is not science and it's not scientific, but the ferocity with which those who question it are attacked does bear a striking resemblance to many fundamentalist/extremist religious sects.
Precisely. The issue is not one of people being unwilling to face basic facts. When presented with the basic observed evidence, nearly all people agree that temperatures around the world have risen over the last century.
The problem comes when we go from "we've been observing temperatures at a bunch of locations for the past century and we're seeing an overall trend toward higher temperatures" to "humans are destroying the planet and everything's going to be destroyed and under water in just ten years unless we radically alter all human activity across the planet right this second". Those who question the methodology used to arrive at the second conclusion are typically labeled "deniers" or "idiots" or some other derogatory term and then ignored. Nevermind whatever evidence or valid questions they may present. And when difficult questions arise which cannot so easily be ignored, the two big fallbacks are the trusty "you're not a scientist, all the scientists alive all say the same thing and they're smart and you're dumb!" and the always popular "you're raising the bar again trying to apply the scientific method and actually expecting model results based on hypotheses we already know are right to produce results that remotely resemble reality and OMG WTF BBQ !!!11!1!"
I don't question what is observable. I question results from rigged models that can't function without someone hard-coding much of what leads to the results. I question the ideas behind such models. I question the methodology of core sampling. I question the removal of peaks and troughs for the vast majority of history and then comparing that data to the peaks and troughs observed today. I question the accuracy of measurements taken at monitoring stations where no one with any relevant training was charged with taking those measurements and when the time and tools were not standardized. I question the oversimplification of "oh look, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas in my lab where I don't have a functional ecosystem representative of Earth's, a magnetic field representative of Earth's, any representation of most of the kinds of fields, particles, and energy that interacts with the Earth, or any sort of separation between those things and my shitty lab experiment where I removed 99.999999999% of the things that drive the global climate and interact with said carbon dioxide".
Further, I resent the explicit claim that there's a "consensus" among scientists regarding either the source or the result of global climate change and I especially resent the implicit claim that the existence of such a consensus would -in any way- alter the validity of questions raised by any individual, regardless of their educational or employment background. Were we to take such stupidity seriously, people like Srnivsa Rmnujan (a poor child in India with no formal mathematics training who was given an advanced trigonometry book at 10, mastered it by himself by age 12, and went on to do tremendous amounts of new work of his own) and Albert Einstein (a Swiss patent clerk who kinda discovered much of modern physics) would never have been allowed to contribute anything to human society and we, as a species, would be vastly poorer for it. When -anyone-, regardless of their background or qualifications, makes valid points and raises valid questions, anyone interested in scientific truth will listen and will raise their voice to make those points heard and to get real answers to those questions.
I've asked many AGWites what evidence would disprove AGW. The most common answer I get is "nothing, because it's already been proven." Folks, if nothing will disprove what you're claiming, it ain't science; doesn't matter where you got it from. Think about it.
But again, I don't care whether John Huntsman sits at home reading science journals or whether he sits at home thinking about how God created the world 6,000 years ago. As a geek, I care about the policies he'll put in place which will either help or hurt things like science education. If the guy thinks Jesus rode dinosaurs to school, I don't care. If he thinks we should be teaching that in science classes around the country, I have a problem with it. I want to know what a candidate will do if elected to help or harm the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the natural world; not what they think. What goes on inside their head isn't of any concern to me whatsoever and doesn't affect me or anyone else.
I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you, but that's the unstated risk one takes when one lends money denominated in the currency of the debtor nation. Were we not the holders of the world's reserve currency, we would not be able to get away with what you're describing. Be that as it may, China (and everyone else lending us money) has implicitly agreed to take the face value of the currency as repayment for the debt and thus we're not technically defaulting.
It's also kind of unfair to say that since the US Federal government controls fiscal policies (i.e. spending) and the Federal Reserve Bank (which is more or less an independent and separate animal from the former) controls the monetary policies driving the US Dollar's inflationary loss of value.
The models are garbage because they're based on terribly incomplete science. That's not the fault of science, but rather the fault of arrogant idiots and grant hounds who need to show extraordinary results to continue bringing in cash so they can show more extraordinary results.
There's nothing anti-science about recognizing when a scientific pursuit - such as understanding the mechanisms that drive the global climate - is in its infancy and requires significant more study before definitive, policy-driving conclusions can be reached. It isn't about being perfect to the day; it's about being accurate enough to know that you have a solid understanding of the fundamental principles behind the process or system you're describing.
Einstein was a scientist; and a good one. Its because of his work that GPS satellites work as well as they do. If he settled for the kinds of results many climate "scientists" do when they warn of dire consequences if we don't make major policy changes, we'd have GPS satellites whose effective resolution would rapidly deteriorate the moment they got into orbit and you'd be sitting here screaming about how I'm a Luddite when I point out that the GPS satellites put in orbit 6 months ago can't even help me determine what state I'm in.
Good science based on understanding of fundamental, driving principles of nature makes specific, accurate predictions. There exists no climate model which does that. The ones that work the best are the ones which have huge amounts of data excluded and replaced with false information and hard, arbitrary constants to help them get closer to historically accurate climate representations. They don't function based on the principles driving the global climate and thus the conclusions drawn from them are worthless.
From the standpoint of any decent scientist, they're absolute shit.
Please direct me to the model for either the world economy or world climate that gives me a 24-month forecast with 90% accuracy (without fudging the inputs, please).
If your model doesn't predict the future, it's shite and it should never be used for policy decisions. Open systems like the world climate and the world economy are too complex for currently available modeling techniques to accurately capture and process necessary data to achieve a high-confidence understanding. We don't even have many of the inputs. We certainly don't have nearly all the interactions. We don't even have a high-level understanding of the processes driving either system. Hence, we don't have models that aren't "shot in the dark, hope this works" or "oh look, if I just pretend these values were actually this, I can sort of get accurate results at the end!"
Today's climate/economic models: x + 5 = 14. Model predicts x = 10, therefore x + 5 = 14^D^D^D 15.
Yay! It works!
And even Ron Paul's supporters have a disturbing tendency to act in this fashion. Their Modus - at least the one's I've spoken or written with is to first declare that Paul is our only hope. Then when asked for details, one gets almost hysterical attacks. In one case, after noting that I wasn't getting anything real but instead personal attacks, I get replies that were mostly profanity, and one that called me a liar and I wasn't getting personal attacks. So all the "Libertarians posing as Republican's have to offer is anger.
I think that they overplayed their "strength".
I think it's terrible that there are so many irrational people supporting Ron Paul. It allows people to write him off as a crackpot when he gets 90 seconds in a one or two hour debate (literally, this actually happened) to explain all of his proposed policies and ideas, and then you see hysterical online reactions from a vocal minority of unstable and/or immature fanatics who can't/won't rationally discuss their favorite candidate with people trying to make an informed choice.
I can tell you that there are many supporters of Ron Paul who are perfectly reasonable, intelligent people who are capable of having a rational discussion about him and his positions. He's not a messiah or a super hero, but rather a pretty smart guy with a lot of ideas which are quite different from the typical Washington DC politician stuff we're used to seeing. I think he has an excellent grasp of cause and effect in the world and some really common sense solutions to major problems. What he doesn't have is a very good delivery that's easily compressed and digested by people who haven't already spent a lot of time researching background information on the topic and digging into Paul's actual thinking on the subject. It makes for some ridiculous soundbites that get air time and combines with some fanatical idiots' stupid actions and statements serving only to discredit him.
There's always been a libertarian wing of the GOP. That's the section that rails against things like the USA PATRIOT ACT, TSA zapping people with cancer walls, and other such things like that. They work well with the fiscal conservatives of the GOP and often clash with the social conservatives (due to the fact that the libertarians aren't interested in a Department of Jesus, Morals, and Prayer to enforce the laws of God upon the people at gunpoint). They also work well with some liberals/progressives in that they don't believe we need a 20 million-man military deployed across the Earth in full readiness to take down the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with extreme prejudice while repeatedly cycling between destroying and rebuilding every nation that disagrees with us.
So in any event, you shouldn't judge the entire lot of Paul supporters (or for that matter, Paul himself) by the actions of some really stupid, counter-productive fanatics. If you're tired of the typical Washington games being played and at least want someone who's open, honest, and consistent about what he believes and what he wants to do, take a look at what Paul has to say. It'll be more long-winded than something Newt or Mitt can run through, but that's at least partially because it has actual substance to it. You probably won't find your messiah in Paul, but you might just find that he can make a lot of sense if you keep an open mind and try to see where he's coming from on a given issue.
1) Without proof one way or the other, it's unfair to judge a candidates' possible, personal view on a subject. Besides, who really cares what they believe for themselves? I care how that person will govern. I'll vote for a guy who believes the Earth is 6000 years old if he's got solid positions on all the important issues and won't screw up the education system with his backwards personal ideology.
2) Unless your state is in New Hampshire, you'd best be ready to hit the write-in if you want to cast your ballot for Huntsman. After he finishes in about 4th or 5th there after living there for the past year and dumping everything his campaign has into the state, he's done. Besides, he has about as much appear as a duck and no chance at all of defeating President Obama in the general election.
The problem with Ron Paul is he doesn't articulate his positions very well and so they sometimes come off sounding like total crackpot stuff. In truth, when you actually look at what he's saying, there's really nothing there that doesn't make any sense. You may not agree that things will actually play out the way he claims (and you'll be right a certain percentage of the time because nobody gets everything right), but some of the stuff he's said before that sounded really wacky and stupid actually came to be. He was slamming Fannie and Freddie in 2003 (and earlier too, but REALLY hard in 2003) for their role in creating a housing bubble that would inevitably burst. 2003 he saw that and people (especially in Congress, especially Frank and others in that circle) were literally laughing at him. "Oh there goes crazy Ron Paul again, talkin' about bubbles and stuff and claiming housing prices are going to tank and people are going to lose their houses and banks are going to be in big trouble. Is that guy crazy or what?!"
When I see stuff like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S3lXDOQ7ec and this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGDisyWkIBM I can't help but think that even the stuff he says today that still doesn't really sit right with me might actually end up being right. He's got such a grasp of how things function that he's able to model (mentally) where we are today and where it's leading us toward tomorrow. Don't just judge what he says by the soundbites that make it through the mics at events. At one of the first major GOP 2012 debates, he was allowed to speak for 90 seconds in a one or two hour debate. Just how great would you sound if you had 90 seconds to tell the world about all your political thoughts and ideas? If you hear him say something that makes him sound like he's from another planet, go and look up more background information about the subject and see if there's video of him sitting down and having a chance to really talk about it. For me, doing that has cleared up 9 out of 10 seemingly wacky position statements. And like I said, who wants to be the Barny Frank laughing at him on the 10th one considering Ron Paul's history on calling things?
Really? Trading openly with nations around the world and ceasing the practice of sanctions, bribes, and bombs to achieve political goals = total isolationism?
Is that some kinda 'tard logic?
The fact that an individual doesn't believe separating every country in the world into the categories of Bribe, Bomb, or Sanction does not indicate that said person is not in favor of engaging with those nations. Believe it or not, there are other ways to interact. You don't have to bribe countries to do what you want with foreign aid. You don't have to sanction countries who are doing things you don't like. You don't have to bomb and invade countries you really don't like. Looking for other options while seeking open trade with every country on Earth does NOT make one an isolationist.
Nor does it make one an isolationist to say that we probably don't need military troops stationed in over 150 countries around the world. 150 countries. Can you even name that many? Tell me, if Ron Paul said we should only have soldiers stationed in 75 countries around the world, would you then call him a half-isolationist? It's unbelievable to me when I hear these morons in the media and in the Republican Party talking about a guy who wants to open dialog with countries where we have no relations, open trade with countries we currently sanction and embargo, and stop interfering in the internal decision making of supposed allies as if he's an isolationist.
To me, an isolationist is someone who pisses off the entire world by bossing around friends, bribing the "friends" who wouldn't listen to the bossing around to make them do as told, funding both sides of wars (Palestinians + Arabs + Israelies), propping up dictators in countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran of yesteryear, etc, slapping sanctions and embargoes on all kinds of countries and groups around the world, and stationing troops all over the planet (particularly in places they're not wanted). That's someone who's ensuring that nearly every relationship we have is a strained and unhealthy one filled with mutual distrust and anger.
People are so damned backwards.
While there are some nutters who actually think we'd be better off defaulting right now (there's a point where we would be, but we aren't near there yet), the entire discussion is actually moot. Ron Paul and others who were strongly against raising the debt ceiling were not insisting that the United States default on its debt obligations. In fact, the US Federal government has plenty of income year-round which would have more than covered all debt obligations and minimal Federal operations. Things like national parks and touristy stuff would have been closed and Federal contractors likely would have been in the dark in terms of payment for a bit as funds trickled in and a new funding model was worked through, but there was NEVER any danger of the US being unable to service its debt simply because of a vote against raising the debt ceiling.
The absolute bullshit spewed by the media on the subject was completely ridiculous. It had no more validity than claiming the US could default on its debt this coming Thursday at 1pm. Could it? Sure. The Dept of the Treasury could simply refuse to service our debt obligations regardless of the availability of funds. It could have chosen to do the same after a Congressional vote against raising the debt ceiling. Or it could pay those debt obligations - an option it's never lost.
As for understanding foreign policy and debt obligations, I think you're misunderstanding things a bit. First of all, the creditors take a hit when a sovereign nation defaults, but the system adjusts and life goes on. Nations too deep into debt are generally better off defaulting than going the IMF/WB route (see also: South America for both sides of how that coin falls). Greece may have actually reached the point where a sovereign default would do that country a lot of good after some horribly painful short-term realignment of national funding and spending. If you believe sovereign default harms trade in any appreciable manner, you're terribly wrong and there's enormous amounts of history to back up that position. It's short term pain (lots of it) for the citizens living there, a period of readjustment, and then typically some excellent economic growth. If properly managed, that puts you on the fast track to success in the long term. The IMF and WB can help a moderately indebted nation chart a path toward fiscal responsibility. What they cannot do is take a nation with crushing sovereign debt and bring it into solvency and economic prosperity. There are times where austerity makes more sense and times where default makes more sense. The US is a case where austerity still makes more sense. Virtually no one has seriously argued otherwise beyond some ignorant goofballs in the tiniest of minority opinion blocks.
Ron Paul doesn't believe that the citizens of his district should be paying income taxes to the Federal government. Ergo, as the representative of those people, he does everything he can to bring as much of their Federal tax dollars back to them as possible. He's never hidden that. He's never claimed to do anything but that.
And as for earmarks themselves, he's absolutely 100% correct that they're completely proper and should be the normal course. The alternative is to simply hand out enormous checks and let someone over on the executive side decide what money goes where. That's not what the US Constitution says. That's not what's supposed to happen. Not a single dollar of Federal government appropriations should be spent without the US Congress stipulating exactly where it's to be spent and on what.
You put Ron Paul in the position to do what he wants and you won't have to worry about the people of his district getting their Federal tax monies returned to them in all sorts of odd ways. Why? Because he'll ensure that money stays there in the first place (along with every other district). The way things work today is that the Federal government takes money from your paycheck and then sends some of it back your way in projects that your Congresscritters managed to get stuck into all sorts of laws. If Ron Paul had his way, the Federal government wouldn't be taking that money, so those weird Federal projects wouldn't be happening. Instead, you'd have local taxes paying for local projects which are actually needed and desired by local communities. Don't need fancy new bus shelters (or the citizens living there don't want to pay for them?) Then they won't get them.
The earmarks thing is a very common right-wing criticism that really just doesn't make sense. Paul would gladly see the spending (even on his own earmarked projects) stopped along with the taxes (and deficits) that feed that spending. But if the taxes are going to be levied and the deficits are going to be run up, and the spending is going to happen no matter what, he's going to ensure that the people he represents get as much of their own money back as possible. There's absolutely nothing inconsistent about the position.
Oh hey, someone who gets it.
I couldn't have said it better myself. The people who think we're able to accurately model the world economy are the same ones who think we're able to model world climate. Maybe, one day, with enough understanding of how all the major underlying principles work - both independently and interacting with one another - we'll be able to model either of them. Until that time, we're young children standing in the reactor control room at a nuclear reactor watching lights flicker on and off and trying to make sense of it all.
The worst possible thing we can do is to start hitting buttons when we don't have a clue what any of this stuff means or what the consequences are of hitting those buttons (be they Fed monetary policy or geo-engineering).
Frankly, it's all symptoms of a classic problem of human arrogance and ego. The possibility that we may one day have the capacity to understand a complex system like the world economy or world climate does not give us any moral authority or inherent competence in understanding it today; nor does it give us license to try screwing with it to "fix" what we (in our infinite ignorance) perceive as problems in the system.
You'll find that you generally get a much better result when you approach something like the world economy with game theory than you do with any supposedly "scientific" Keynesian economics models. It doesn't mean you don't keep trying; it means you don't base policy decisions on broken models you already know aren't worth a damn just because you WANT to believe we SHOULD be able to construct accurate models.
Oh yes, because the currently prevailing ideology regarding economics is working out so well. Hey, how's that Federal Reserve working out for everyone? Isn't it cool to not have any more boom and bust cycles?
What's that? The boom of the 20s? The Great Depression? The boom of the late 40s? Stagflation in the 70s? Major crashes in the 80s? A tech boom in the 90s? A tech bubble crash in the early 2000s? A housing boom/bubble in the mid 2000s? The worst worldwide economic collapse since the Great Depression with lingering unemployment which will likely not allow us to return to normal employment numbers for a decade or more beginning in 2007/2008?
Wait a minute... maybe (and I'm just speculating here)... maybe the "experts" on economics from the last hundred or so years DIDN'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT.
Let's get some past-performance reference for how Ron Paul does in terms of understanding how things work in the real world: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGDisyWkIBM and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S3lXDOQ7ec
Yeah, you're right - we shouldn't be listening to crackpots like Ron Paul. We should be listening to geniuses like Ben Bernanke who've done so well for all of us thus far.
The RBMK-1000 reactors in operation after Chernobyl were all retrofitted with a number of additional safety features. As part of the retrofitting, the positive void coefficient was significantly lowered, meaning the reaction rate increase in the worst-case scenario is drastically reduced. It's still a terrible design as nuclear power plants go, but again, the issue with the Chernobyl reactor wasn't simply the design, but a combination of that, the few existing safety features being disabled, the modifications made by Soviet scientists to the reactor core, and the experiment they were running.
Even your typical RMBK-1000 reactor could not have done what the Chernobyl reactor did because nobody using nuclear reactors at power plants would -ever- do what was done at Chernobyl. Again, Chernobyl was NOT a civilian nuclear power plant. It was not designed to be. It was not run like one. Its "accident" was not the result of normal (or even atypical) operations at one. This is why is beyond absurd when people try to bring up Chernobyl in discussions about nuclear power plants.
The good news is, I immediately know that I can run circles around anyone who bring up Chernobyl in a discussion about nuclear power because they don't know the first goddamn thing about what they're talking about. Nobody who has any understanding of the design and history of nuclear power plants would ever bring up Chernobyl in a discussion about safety.
And I'm certainly not trying to claim that nuclear power is some kind of magically safe and wonderful thing handed to us from a mountaintop by the hand of God himself. It takes proper planning, design, and execution to build a nuclear power plant which is passively safe (meaning everyone running the thing runs away during a natural or man-made disaster and nothing bad happens with the reactor(s)), and despite the extra expenses involved, I don't believe we should EVER build a nuclear power plant which isn't passively safe. That said, when they're built with at least basic concepts of safety in mind, nuclear power plants are VASTLY safer than any other major source of power we've ever imagined. I'll take a retrofitted RBMK-1000 over your typical coal-fire plant any day of the week. Hell, I'd rather live next to one of those than downstream from a hydro plant. Accidents at those things have killed hundreds of thousands of people in just hours. Coal-fire plant accidents have killed hundreds at a time and left vast area (entire towns) uninhabitable (to say nothing of the amount of heavy metals and radioactive materials they release on a GOOD day).
I haven't yet met a person who's really studied the issue of power plant safety who hasn't agreed that nuclear power ends up being the cleanest, safest, most cost-effective source of power that actually works at the scales needed for the human race to function in modern society. The old-school Greenpeacers even came to that conclusion, which is probably why the new kids over there actually get sent out with protest signs depicting Hiroshima-style nuclear explosions to talk about nuclear power. Once you know how these things work, you just can't buy into the FUD and outright bullshit of the protestors. Once you have a grasp of the physics taking place, it just becomes terribly obvious what can and cannot happen at these power plants. And what you discover is that the news media, protestors, and your average Joe Sixpack don't have the first clue what they're talking about when they try to (and unfortunately do) influence policy decisions with lawmakers.
When we saw Fukushima unfolding, just about everyone was shocked by what was happening. People who understood the design of nuclear power plants knew it wasn't half as dire as the hysterical crap thrown out by the news media (Bill Nye? How the F do you have a JOB?!), but were still surprised that things got out of control (within the limits of the physics of reactors) so quickly and easily. Once the facts came out about these particular designs and the decisions ma
Chernobyl is an unfair comparison/example to make. Chernobyl wasn't primarily a nuclear power plant. Oh, it put electricity into the grid, but only because it was the easiest option to get rid of the 'waste' energy. The Chernobyl reactor which had a disastrous "accident" was a highly experiment modification of an already extremely dangerous design (the Soviet RBMK-1000) whose primary purpose was high-risk nuclear reactor experimentation and whose secondary purpose was refinement of nuclear weapons materials.
When the "accident" happened, they were running an experiment to essentially see what the reactor's stress limits were. Because the few, pitiful safety systems built into that monstrosity would have hindered the experiment, they were disabled. So you have a terrible design (no passive safety to speak of, instead it was a high-positive void coefficient design), the few available safety systems were disabled, no passive safety built in, the reactor was modified to do extremely dangerous experiments, and one such experiment was being run to push the thing to (and beyond) its limits without any safety systems whatsoever.
This is not a civilian nuclear power plant and no western design in history - from the very first western plant to the latest and greatest available today - COULD have had the kind of accident that one did. Even in the case of the Fukushima plant, you had known (as in known for about ~40 years) design issues for which there had been an available fix (available for something like ~37 years) from the manufacturer, you had a plant operator who didn't care to fix the known safety issue, you had a complicit government unwilling to force them to fix it, and when a massive earthquake (beyond anyone's expectations) hit, the reactor did exactly what it was supposed to do and it was only the resulting tsunami which actually caused problems for the reactor. Nevermind the fact that the tsunami killed vast numbers of people and annihilated vast swaths of crops and property; the only story anyone cared about was a nuclear reactor that basically just became unusable and in which one person died.
For a plant that's correctly maintained, Three Mile Island is about the worst potential disaster you can have. I say "worst" partially in jest since nobody died and modeling/studies of people who would have received the highest (extremely small) doses of radiation from the disaster have consistently showed zero increase in radiation-related health issues. In Fukushima, some radioactive material was released. Thus far, the very few actual soil, plant, and wildlife samples taken from the exclusion zone have shown exactly what anyone familiar with this technology would expect: the really "hot" stuff is already mostly gone, the most dangerous of the long-lasting stuff is NOT making its way into groundwater or plant or animal life (due to the way it bonds with various soil components), and what's left is very unlikely to cause any statistically significant (possibly even measurable) increase in health issues.
Basically, you'll get more radiation exposure from taking a 747 from NY to London while eating a couple bananas. The studies which dispute that information are all (at least, all the ones I've seen) based on models with a LOT of assumptions built in about radioactive material amounts, compositions, and points of escape from containment. All the actual measurements I've seen from Fukushima show that people could be living within the exclusion zone right now and almost certainly never know the difference. Much of what's talked about in terms of the radiation released is absolute FUD (like the geniuses claiming that East coast US milk was irradiated by Fukushima fallout).
To my way of thinking, we simply need to replace all the old reactors with shiny new ones ASAP. Personally, I'd prefer the ARC-1000s. They're reasonably priced, safe-by-design, a beautiful hybrid light/heavy water design allowing maximum fuel flexibility and performance, and they'll pump out quite a bit of juice. The nice thing is
Cheaper.... to construct? Certainly. To operate on a per/TWh generated over the lifetime of the plant basis? Not even close. In fact, it's a joke.
Let's talk about the fact that nuclear power is SAFER (as in less deaths per TWh generated) than wind power. Oh, you didn't think about that one, did ya?
$2000/yr?
Well, that's a bit more than one month's rent of a 1 bedroom apartment in SF, NYC, or DC. Not sure what you'd do for housing for the other 11 months, nor what you'd do for food, clothing, transportation, or just about anything else. I spend $2000/yr in gasoline. There was a time where I spent $2000/yr at Starbucks (a habit I've since kicked to the curb). That $163/month would pay for about 3/4 of a trip to the grocery store for two weeks worth of food.
To give you a middle-of-the-road idea of how things are currently in the US, $30,000 gross annual salary is enough for one (maybe two if you stretch it) people to live in an ok apartment (nothing fancy, not a house unless you're in the middle of nowhere), feed yourself somewhat decent food (probably Safeway specials, certainly not fresh, locally grown, organic stuff), get yourself back and forth to work everyday in an ok (likely used, but running-alright car), and put ok (nothing fancy or name-brand) clothes on your back. At $50,000/yr, you can have a decent apartment or small house in an ok to decent area, feed yourself slightly healthier stuff, have a slightly newer and more reliable vehicle for transportation, and probably have a kid enjoy those things as well.
Now, some people survive (I wouldn't call it "living") on less than that. Assuming you have a wife and kid and you're making $15,000/yr, you're living in a slum or government-subsidized dump in the middle of gangland, living off the McDonald's dollar menu for your 1-2 meals a day (though your kid might actually get 3 meals a day when their drug infested hellhole of an inner city public "school" (gang recruitment complex) is in session), likely walking or taking the bus (when you can afford it and if a bus route exists where you are) to most places, and pretty much are in a miserable pile of shit every single day of your life. You and your family manage to survive at this level of income only by the grace of a steady flow of local, state, and Federal tax dollars providing support for some/most of your extremely basic shelter and food needs and your child likely never receives the tools to break out of this cycle of poverty.
So how bad would things have to be for US citizens to live off $163/month? I invite you to explore that question while watching the classic Mel Gibson film "Mad Max". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079501/
I think you'll find an accurate representation of the kind of society you would witness if average folks in the US were ever forced to exist at that income level.
Will Newegg get me an identical (and I mean right down to the EXACT model if not the same manufacturing run) replacement drive in my hands on site within 4 hours, 5 years after I bought the thing from them? Will Newegg replace an entire enclosure and all its drives extremely quickly and assist on site with migration if the device(s) sold reach an unacceptable level of hardware failures?
NetApp's never held a gun to my head. They offer storage, software, and services at a price. If you believe their price is not worthwhile, check with their direct competitors like EMC* (Note: please consult your cardiologist prior to doing this). If you don't think any of those vendors are giving you the combination of products and services which give you proper value, you're perfectly free to dial up Newegg, buy whatever you want from them, and let your career and your reputation hang on the hope that it all works out for you.
I love Newegg for my personal stuff and when I worked at a small consulting company we sometimes even bought stuff from there (as opposed to our regular distributors) depending on part availability, price, etc. Would I put my paycheck on the line to save my employer some money? No; I'll go through the RFQ process dealing with enterprise-level vendors, present my own analysis to the higher-ups regarding what we actually need versus what would be nice to have, and end up with the level of service and support that enterprise customers need. We sometimes need ridiculous things. When [insert enterprise server vendor here] has a bad group of DIMMs from [insert memory manufacturer here], they don't make me send them the DIMMS one-by-one as they go bad when 6 have gone bad in one box already and more are continuing to go bad and they don't make me sit around waiting for shipping, diagnostics, processing, etc. Instead, they say "yeah, sounds like a bad batch. We're REALLY sorry those aren't working properly, and we've got a replacement set of DIMMS for that entire order being overnighted right now with a return label enclosed for all the DIMMs in the bad group."
Add up the time I'd spend dealing with Newegg, shipping, going back and forth with them for RMAs of individual DIMMs, customer downtime/slowdowns (as capacity dwindles as boxes rotate out of the cluster for repeated DIMM replacements), and engineer time testing everything over and over again to try and weed out everything that's actually going bad, then put that up against the initial savings I'd get for getting the RAM/HDDs/etc from Newegg vs the enterprise vendor. My time costs the company quite a bit of money, as do the opportunity costs which arise when my time is eaten by trivial matters like RMAs. It may not be worthwhile for YOU to buy a $250 for $1000 from an enterprise level vendor, but I can ASSURE you that it's plenty worth it in the long run for a great many businesses.
Not in this case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Tort_Claims_Act