To grant them rights not explicitly outlined in law is a travesty.
The Constitution explicitly grants such rights. For example, the First Amendment doesn't say that "Congress shall make no law (unless the target works for 'artificial creations of law', then it's ok)..." No such distinction is made. Similarly, the same holds for various other amendments. And of course, there is the Ninth Amendment which prohibits the federal government from prohibiting stuff just because.
So a corporation can't be held responsible, neither can the people that work for it.
That's a prime example of a non sequitur. Fire hydrants can't be help responsible for crime too. So that must mean that fire fighters can't either. Or guns can't be held responsible for crime so I can shoot people legally. These sort of arguments don't make sense logically because there's no connection between the two assertions. There are plenty of examples of corporate employees being charged and convicted of crimes.
He doesn't want to be forced to pour a lot of money into it. He doesn't want to be forced to pay for a lot of things government does right now. When your objective is an overall reduction in government, you don't have time for details.
While I think you sum up my attitude well, I want to point out something about that last sentence. Nobody has that kind of time for a government with a budget almost a hundred million times larger than the median personal income in the US and which employs several million people in the US.
Nor do we have the details. For example, most such claims of "efficiency" in Social Security ignore whether there is fraud. The slim overhead is for a system that writes checks, not one that has sophisticated fraud detection.
Similarly, they ignore that Social Security doesn't do anything useful with the funds that get put in. Historically, these got transferred immediately to the US general fund (via purchase of imaginary treasury bonds) and squandered that fiscal year. Or dumped in the laps of the relatively rich elderly. Now, it's starting to reverse with Social Security consuming a small but increasing portion of the federal budget.
It's the same way a lefty would generalize entire groups of people ("1%ers" "the rich" etc). Difference is, a lefty has much more experience in this field, and will likely win in a battle of generalizations.
The real difference is that I'm talking concrete money (and a vast economic misdirection of society) and the "lefty" is talking vague groups of people. And it's not really "lefties" that are causing the problem here with Social Security, but people who vote, who tend to be older and more likely to benefit from Social Security.
If that was on purpose, you appear to be somewhat uninformed with respect to the charter and organizational structure of the Social Security Administration.
And you appear to be unfamiliar with the accounting. Social Security doesn't do GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) for example. And real pension funds (yes, I know that Social Security isn't meant to be anything useful like a pension fund) manage the funds they have, not just shunt them off to the general budget of the US to be squandered that fiscal year. The "efficiency" of Social Security is bought at tremendous cost.
If you think companies should be able to reap all of the profit while the rest of us bear the risk and expense of cleaning up after them, then enjoy the terrible world you'll live in.
No, I already stated what I think. Namely, that if this were truly important to you, then you should have to put something in the pot as well.
If a person was treated like a corporation, murder would be legal. You could walk up to somone with 10,000 witnesses, 10 video cameras coving you, then shoot someone. If you were tried for it, you'd challenge the prosecution to prove you didn't have a muscle spasm that caused the trigger pull.
Except that corporations can't really commit crimes. People employed by the corporation would be commiting those crimes. And that makes a lot of difference to all this talk of treating corporations "like people", except when we don't want to.
The blast(s) happend instantly and killed both roughly 100,000.
Already a week later noth bombs had killed an anditional 100,000 each. That means a week later we are already far beyond your proposed 250,000.
Only if that actually happened. It's amazing how many of these things never happened. I think what happened here is that someone used a really bad statistical method to generate a spurious and egregious overestimate of deaths from the two atomic bombs. And then a certain gullible Slashdotter sucked that up, hook, line, and sinker.
For example, the Social Security Administration is almost unfathomably efficient
Keep in mind that all Social Security is supposed to do is write checks that people cash. It's not unfathomably efficient once you consider that, but rather expensive.
Sounds like maybe you should pony up then. One of the problems with pollution mitigation is that it uses Other Peoples' Money and is mandated by people who don't care how expensive it is to clean up pollution to a arbitrarily low level. This leads to creation of externalities by the regulators - fining businesses and whatnot for effort that no one else would willingly pay for.
I think that large fines should have a deductible, just like most insurance does. If Exxon pays a $900 million payment for cleanup costs, then someone should pony up oh, $300 million in matching funds. That way we can determine whether the cleanup to the mandated degree really was that important or not.
Or are you one of the idiots who think that humans recreating extinct species is somehow "natural"? Sorry, it's no more natural than my Buick....
Depends what definition of natural you are using. But by any definition of "natural", recreating nearly exactly a species that once existed is more natural than creating an organism that couldn't form naturally (eg, maize with genes inserted from the animal kingdom).
Regulatory control should not be so weak and subject to influence that gigantic corporations guilty of gross negligence actually have bargaining power in these situations; they need to be at the mercy of regulators and of the public.
That would be unjust. Justice means among other things that one who is accused of crimes is allowed to defend themselves.
Japan's nuclear industry managed to avoid absorbing the critical lessons learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl
Once again, we see this calumny uttered, this time by someone in a position of authority. So what critical lesson from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl wasn't learned? I notice that the report never answers this. It's just a throwaway line by someone who will never be called on it.
As I noted in a long ago reply, I don't buy that there was a lot to learn from these earlier accidents. They were of a different character.
If someone does something incredibly stupid, like drive drunk and slam a car into a tree, what is there to learn? Don't be stupid?
What lessons were there to learn from Chernobyl? Japan didn't have reactors as unsafe as those used at Chernobyl. They didn't do stupid stuff nor were inclined to. They didn't fail to warn the public nor were inclined to.
Going back to the report, many of the supposed faults have nothing to do with the accident. For example:
Since 2006, the regulators and TEPCO were aware of the risk that a total outage of electricity at the Fukushima Daiichi plant might occur if a tsunami were to reach the level of
the site. They were also aware of the risk of reactor core damage from the loss of seawater
pumps in the case of a tsunami larger than assumed in the Japan Society of Civil Engineers
estimation. NISA knew that TEPCO had not prepared any measures to lessen or eliminate
the risk, but failed to provide specific instructions to remedy the situation.
It all sounds so cut and dry until you realize that a) these organizations have to be very conservative and not immediate act on "awareness" in a way that costs a lot of money and makes the problem worse, and b) the reactors in question were scheduled to be decommissioned starting in 2011. 2006 is just not that long ago, and making a decision not to implement costly changes for reactors that are to be decommissioned anyway is not unreasonable.
This goes back to what offended me in the first place - yet another snide comment that an experienced nuclear plant operator with a good operation record, TEPCO was the "worst option". Well, who would be better? As it turned out, TEPCO managed to handle the accident and is handing the subsequent cleanup.
While that is an interesting theory and one sufficiently worthy that I regret to some degree insulting you, San Francisco isn't part of a "targeted employment area" (or TEA) so it doesn't get the half off. The green card would have to put in at least $1 million in theory. Similarly, Florida only has one such TEA.
Having said that, there's other ways to make that work. For example, the EB-5 visa holders could be flipping houses between fellow EB-5 holders. Say acquire a million dollar loan through a handling entity which is used to buy real estate from another EB-5 holder (at 25% over market rate and auction snipe at last minute, that would keep the risk of losing the home down to pretty much nil). Then on your EB-5 visa application mention the assets, but not the loan (which might not count legally due to it being in another country).
Presto! A million dollar or so qualification for the visa. Then you sell the asset to the next person in line and pay off your loan. The costs to the EB-5 holder end up being a small amount of interest, the handling charges for the entity managing the whole charade, transaction costs of the actual real estate sales, and the $1500 application fee for the EB-5 visa.
Here's the thing. Because the actual costs proportion to the real estate are probably near negligible (it gets flipped to the next EB-5 applicant), there's no serious reason to "save" half a million dollars by targeting a TEA.
At that point, the ideal markets are places with high real estate prices and some vacant real estate at that level available for the flip, requiring less transactions. For example, San Francisco could require one to three real estate transactions, while Modesto might require half a dozen.
So yes, this sort of activity could be driving the market or conversely, this sort of activity could be attracted to unusually high volume, high price markets because that is more efficient.
But then we get to your recommended solution. Why would it be a good idea to ban foreign ownership of US real estate? That remains a non sequitur. Even if we are truly seeing yet another immigration policy gimmick pumping up the price of real estate in San Francisco, the solution would be to fix or eliminate the policy not screw with ownership of property.
If that really is all you're complaining about, then private bus services are already regulated in the US and I bet San Fransisco already has its own regulations on the matter. There seems no point to your concern.
Perhaps it's time to take a page from one of these books, and apply the same restrictions on a state-wide level, rather than bitching about San Francisco in particular, since San Francisco has no legal ability to regulate foreign ownership.
Bigotry is so interesting. Here, we go from a bunch of people wanting cheap rent to foreigners bad without any logical connection between the two.
Out of 6 offers I made on houses in San Francisco - houses I fully intended to live in, not merely hold as investments or use as rental properties or "flip" in the new real estate bubble - all six were bid out by over 25% at the last second by all cash offers from foreign investors.
Was the property at that 25% premium still a good investment? If so, then perhaps you should bid more next time or snipe those auctions just like the pros did. If not, then a foreign investor just donated to the US economy. Send him a thank you letter.
Only as far as it allows them to continue to shoot stuff.
Which let us note is pretty damn far since it implies creation of wild areas where hunting is allowed and protection of species upon which the hunters would hunt or which hunted animals rely.
And restoring extinct species to life is pretty much the same as GMO corn - they're both humans changing things for their own benefit without regard to the effect on the biosphere as a whole.
Except that one was at some point in the past a creature not formed by man and the other never was.
We're not even in a position to prevent the current ongoing extinctions.
So we're not in a position to set aside land for the species at risk? We're not in a position to reduce or regulate human activities that could harm the viability of this species? We're not in a position to fight invasive species that might be competing with or preying upon the endangered species? I disagree. I think we're in a position to do all these things, if we think they are worthy enough.
You take a comment, made to someone else where you wern't involved, where my knowledge has been since updated and cite that as some major flaw in my argument upon which you base your fucking magnum opus. That's pathetic.
Not for me. I see this as evidence that you reached a hasty judgment and have stuck by that poor judgment ever since despite becoming somewhat more educated on the subject.
Ultimately, your opinion is irrelevant as, ironically, the very statement I replied to "the more real knowledge we have about nuclear power and its problems, the more comfortable people will get to nuclear power" has been heeded by everyone else and like me the more they have learned about the nuclear industry the more they can see what an out of control failure it is and lobbied for shutting the industry down due to the safety problems exposed.
Well, I must admit to being a little disappointed that the usual dysfunctional, anti-nuclear theater appears to have gotten the better of reason in this case. Well, there's always next time. And when someone says "this is almost as bad as Fukushima," we can reply "and how many people actually died at Fukushima?"
Yet no one has thought to consider that maybe the generator placement slipped through the cracks just because of how complex the Fukushima plant was? Finally, engineering doesn't magically get it right the first time.
Any responsible nuclear advocate would be able to make an honest ownership of those issues and cite how they have been improved, not deny they exist and try to cover them up.
What ownership? I'm tired of the ignorant and the foolish (you are among their number) trying to shoehorn me into their little morality play.
You continually demonstrate you lack any substantial knowledge on the subject as The official report of The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission" reveals the collusion that took place with the regulator so improvements would not be put in place, precisely because the same beleif system in the safety of Nuclear Power that you maintain affected all of the safety proposals put forward within and by TEPCO.
Note all the vague talk for "the backup generators didn't start when they were most needed". Sure, there may have been this regulatory "collusion" or perhaps rather that TEPCO and the regulators had to overlook certain regulations in order for Japanese society to function, but that doesn't mean that adhering to regulation would have resulted in the backup generators starting when they needed to.
I don't know whether this report is an honest attempt to seek the truth of the matter or merely another hollow ritual for assigning blame. But I see how you use it.
Regulation doesn't in itself magically create a safe environment. Dysfunctional regulation, by which I mean regulation that is impossible to follow and simultaneously operate a nuclear plant, is IMHO prevalent throughout industry in the developed world. In such circumstances, the regulator has to overlook or ignore certain sorts of regulation violations in order for the plant to function at all, much less in a safe manner. I consider such regulation harmful enough that it can actually make risky activities less safe.
I don't see that as a cause for the Fukushima accident, even remotely. What I do see as causes are things like too narrow a horizon for worst case scenarios, not spotting a single point of failure, and the inability to build safer nuclear plants so that old riskier ones can be decommissioned.
While some could be addressed and probably will be by regulation improvements, the fundamental problem is that society remains wildly risk ignorant. For some people, nuclear power is scary while a slow societal death from arbitrarily pushing up the cost of basic infrastructure (like a power system) isn't.
Maybe everyone should do the responsible thing and simply not go to college if they can't afford it without debt. Surely the genius of free market will figure out how to run a modern economy with population not educated beyond high school level.
I pretty much agree with this even though you were trying to be sarcastic. Making a bunch of educated people with lots of debt and poor ability to pay it off is not an improvement.
apparently there are limits on how much an individual student may borrow, but not on how much the school can charge
Thanks for the link. I wonder if those limits get adjusted each year for education-related inflation?
This reminds me of the NASA New Start Inflation Index. It's supposed to be an estimate of inflation particular to aerospace projects that NASA is involved with. The problem comes in that it also gets used to adjust costs estimates for future NASA projects which in turn affects the index in the future. As a result there's a feedback in the index that causes it to grow faster than normal producer inflation by a great amount.
But in order to work N95 respirators need to be professionally fitted to each person's individual face to make sure there is a tight seal with no leaks.
Only if you are trying to comply with US regulations, say because you work at Stanford University (the source of the linked document). Since any hypothetical "professional" fitters in China would not be complying with US regulation, there's no guarantee that they would fit properly. It would have been better to link to generic fitting instructions for the masks in question as that would actually be useful.
If I'm sorting stuff lexicographically, I generally use bin sort (often grouping things into four or so large bins first like say A-G, H-M, N-S, and T-Z for sorts on people's surnames). For numerical records, I use merge sort. Sometimes I use both, like for sorting cards (bin sort on suit and then merge sort each suit). It can be quite a time saver when you have to sort a large number of paper records to learn these sorting algorithms.
I suppose what could make this story more interesting is what sort of nontrivial algorithms do people use on a regular basis in a non-programming situation?
Slashdot Mirror
To grant them rights not explicitly outlined in law is a travesty.
The Constitution explicitly grants such rights. For example, the First Amendment doesn't say that "Congress shall make no law (unless the target works for 'artificial creations of law', then it's ok)..." No such distinction is made. Similarly, the same holds for various other amendments. And of course, there is the Ninth Amendment which prohibits the federal government from prohibiting stuff just because.
So a corporation can't be held responsible, neither can the people that work for it.
That's a prime example of a non sequitur. Fire hydrants can't be help responsible for crime too. So that must mean that fire fighters can't either. Or guns can't be held responsible for crime so I can shoot people legally. These sort of arguments don't make sense logically because there's no connection between the two assertions. There are plenty of examples of corporate employees being charged and convicted of crimes.
He doesn't want to be forced to pour a lot of money into it. He doesn't want to be forced to pay for a lot of things government does right now. When your objective is an overall reduction in government, you don't have time for details.
While I think you sum up my attitude well, I want to point out something about that last sentence. Nobody has that kind of time for a government with a budget almost a hundred million times larger than the median personal income in the US and which employs several million people in the US.
Nor do we have the details. For example, most such claims of "efficiency" in Social Security ignore whether there is fraud. The slim overhead is for a system that writes checks, not one that has sophisticated fraud detection.
Similarly, they ignore that Social Security doesn't do anything useful with the funds that get put in. Historically, these got transferred immediately to the US general fund (via purchase of imaginary treasury bonds) and squandered that fiscal year. Or dumped in the laps of the relatively rich elderly. Now, it's starting to reverse with Social Security consuming a small but increasing portion of the federal budget.
It's the same way a lefty would generalize entire groups of people ("1%ers" "the rich" etc). Difference is, a lefty has much more experience in this field, and will likely win in a battle of generalizations.
The real difference is that I'm talking concrete money (and a vast economic misdirection of society) and the "lefty" is talking vague groups of people. And it's not really "lefties" that are causing the problem here with Social Security, but people who vote, who tend to be older and more likely to benefit from Social Security.
If that was on purpose, you appear to be somewhat uninformed with respect to the charter and organizational structure of the Social Security Administration.
And you appear to be unfamiliar with the accounting. Social Security doesn't do GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) for example. And real pension funds (yes, I know that Social Security isn't meant to be anything useful like a pension fund) manage the funds they have, not just shunt them off to the general budget of the US to be squandered that fiscal year. The "efficiency" of Social Security is bought at tremendous cost.
If you think companies should be able to reap all of the profit while the rest of us bear the risk and expense of cleaning up after them, then enjoy the terrible world you'll live in.
No, I already stated what I think. Namely, that if this were truly important to you, then you should have to put something in the pot as well.
If a person was treated like a corporation, murder would be legal. You could walk up to somone with 10,000 witnesses, 10 video cameras coving you, then shoot someone. If you were tried for it, you'd challenge the prosecution to prove you didn't have a muscle spasm that caused the trigger pull.
Except that corporations can't really commit crimes. People employed by the corporation would be commiting those crimes. And that makes a lot of difference to all this talk of treating corporations "like people", except when we don't want to.
The blast(s) happend instantly and killed both roughly 100,000. Already a week later noth bombs had killed an anditional 100,000 each. That means a week later we are already far beyond your proposed 250,000.
Only if that actually happened. It's amazing how many of these things never happened. I think what happened here is that someone used a really bad statistical method to generate a spurious and egregious overestimate of deaths from the two atomic bombs. And then a certain gullible Slashdotter sucked that up, hook, line, and sinker.
For example, the Social Security Administration is almost unfathomably efficient
Keep in mind that all Social Security is supposed to do is write checks that people cash. It's not unfathomably efficient once you consider that, but rather expensive.
We want the beaches cleaned up first and foremost
Sounds like maybe you should pony up then. One of the problems with pollution mitigation is that it uses Other Peoples' Money and is mandated by people who don't care how expensive it is to clean up pollution to a arbitrarily low level. This leads to creation of externalities by the regulators - fining businesses and whatnot for effort that no one else would willingly pay for.
I think that large fines should have a deductible, just like most insurance does. If Exxon pays a $900 million payment for cleanup costs, then someone should pony up oh, $300 million in matching funds. That way we can determine whether the cleanup to the mandated degree really was that important or not.
Or are you one of the idiots who think that humans recreating extinct species is somehow "natural"? Sorry, it's no more natural than my Buick....
Depends what definition of natural you are using. But by any definition of "natural", recreating nearly exactly a species that once existed is more natural than creating an organism that couldn't form naturally (eg, maize with genes inserted from the animal kingdom).
And that is completely irrelevant since corporations have people as owners, workers, and customers. When are you going to consider those people?
Regulatory control should not be so weak and subject to influence that gigantic corporations guilty of gross negligence actually have bargaining power in these situations; they need to be at the mercy of regulators and of the public.
That would be unjust. Justice means among other things that one who is accused of crimes is allowed to defend themselves.
Japan's nuclear industry managed to avoid absorbing the critical lessons learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl
Once again, we see this calumny uttered, this time by someone in a position of authority. So what critical lesson from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl wasn't learned? I notice that the report never answers this. It's just a throwaway line by someone who will never be called on it.
As I noted in a long ago reply, I don't buy that there was a lot to learn from these earlier accidents. They were of a different character.
If someone does something incredibly stupid, like drive drunk and slam a car into a tree, what is there to learn? Don't be stupid?
What lessons were there to learn from Chernobyl? Japan didn't have reactors as unsafe as those used at Chernobyl. They didn't do stupid stuff nor were inclined to. They didn't fail to warn the public nor were inclined to.
Going back to the report, many of the supposed faults have nothing to do with the accident. For example:
Since 2006, the regulators and TEPCO were aware of the risk that a total outage of electricity at the Fukushima Daiichi plant might occur if a tsunami were to reach the level of the site. They were also aware of the risk of reactor core damage from the loss of seawater pumps in the case of a tsunami larger than assumed in the Japan Society of Civil Engineers estimation. NISA knew that TEPCO had not prepared any measures to lessen or eliminate the risk, but failed to provide specific instructions to remedy the situation.
It all sounds so cut and dry until you realize that a) these organizations have to be very conservative and not immediate act on "awareness" in a way that costs a lot of money and makes the problem worse, and b) the reactors in question were scheduled to be decommissioned starting in 2011. 2006 is just not that long ago, and making a decision not to implement costly changes for reactors that are to be decommissioned anyway is not unreasonable.
This goes back to what offended me in the first place - yet another snide comment that an experienced nuclear plant operator with a good operation record, TEPCO was the "worst option". Well, who would be better? As it turned out, TEPCO managed to handle the accident and is handing the subsequent cleanup.
While that is an interesting theory and one sufficiently worthy that I regret to some degree insulting you, San Francisco isn't part of a "targeted employment area" (or TEA) so it doesn't get the half off. The green card would have to put in at least $1 million in theory. Similarly, Florida only has one such TEA.
Having said that, there's other ways to make that work. For example, the EB-5 visa holders could be flipping houses between fellow EB-5 holders. Say acquire a million dollar loan through a handling entity which is used to buy real estate from another EB-5 holder (at 25% over market rate and auction snipe at last minute, that would keep the risk of losing the home down to pretty much nil). Then on your EB-5 visa application mention the assets, but not the loan (which might not count legally due to it being in another country).
Presto! A million dollar or so qualification for the visa. Then you sell the asset to the next person in line and pay off your loan. The costs to the EB-5 holder end up being a small amount of interest, the handling charges for the entity managing the whole charade, transaction costs of the actual real estate sales, and the $1500 application fee for the EB-5 visa.
Here's the thing. Because the actual costs proportion to the real estate are probably near negligible (it gets flipped to the next EB-5 applicant), there's no serious reason to "save" half a million dollars by targeting a TEA.
At that point, the ideal markets are places with high real estate prices and some vacant real estate at that level available for the flip, requiring less transactions. For example, San Francisco could require one to three real estate transactions, while Modesto might require half a dozen.
So yes, this sort of activity could be driving the market or conversely, this sort of activity could be attracted to unusually high volume, high price markets because that is more efficient.
But then we get to your recommended solution. Why would it be a good idea to ban foreign ownership of US real estate? That remains a non sequitur. Even if we are truly seeing yet another immigration policy gimmick pumping up the price of real estate in San Francisco, the solution would be to fix or eliminate the policy not screw with ownership of property.
If that really is all you're complaining about, then private bus services are already regulated in the US and I bet San Fransisco already has its own regulations on the matter. There seems no point to your concern.
Perhaps it's time to take a page from one of these books, and apply the same restrictions on a state-wide level, rather than bitching about San Francisco in particular, since San Francisco has no legal ability to regulate foreign ownership.
Bigotry is so interesting. Here, we go from a bunch of people wanting cheap rent to foreigners bad without any logical connection between the two.
Out of 6 offers I made on houses in San Francisco - houses I fully intended to live in, not merely hold as investments or use as rental properties or "flip" in the new real estate bubble - all six were bid out by over 25% at the last second by all cash offers from foreign investors.
Was the property at that 25% premium still a good investment? If so, then perhaps you should bid more next time or snipe those auctions just like the pros did. If not, then a foreign investor just donated to the US economy. Send him a thank you letter.
Only as far as it allows them to continue to shoot stuff.
Which let us note is pretty damn far since it implies creation of wild areas where hunting is allowed and protection of species upon which the hunters would hunt or which hunted animals rely.
And restoring extinct species to life is pretty much the same as GMO corn - they're both humans changing things for their own benefit without regard to the effect on the biosphere as a whole.
Except that one was at some point in the past a creature not formed by man and the other never was.
We're not even in a position to prevent the current ongoing extinctions.
So we're not in a position to set aside land for the species at risk? We're not in a position to reduce or regulate human activities that could harm the viability of this species? We're not in a position to fight invasive species that might be competing with or preying upon the endangered species? I disagree. I think we're in a position to do all these things, if we think they are worthy enough.
You take a comment, made to someone else where you wern't involved, where my knowledge has been since updated and cite that as some major flaw in my argument upon which you base your fucking magnum opus. That's pathetic.
Not for me. I see this as evidence that you reached a hasty judgment and have stuck by that poor judgment ever since despite becoming somewhat more educated on the subject.
Ultimately, your opinion is irrelevant as, ironically, the very statement I replied to "the more real knowledge we have about nuclear power and its problems, the more comfortable people will get to nuclear power" has been heeded by everyone else and like me the more they have learned about the nuclear industry the more they can see what an out of control failure it is and lobbied for shutting the industry down due to the safety problems exposed.
Well, I must admit to being a little disappointed that the usual dysfunctional, anti-nuclear theater appears to have gotten the better of reason in this case. Well, there's always next time. And when someone says "this is almost as bad as Fukushima," we can reply "and how many people actually died at Fukushima?"
Yet no one has thought to consider that maybe the generator placement slipped through the cracks just because of how complex the Fukushima plant was? Finally, engineering doesn't magically get it right the first time.
Any responsible nuclear advocate would be able to make an honest ownership of those issues and cite how they have been improved, not deny they exist and try to cover them up.
What ownership? I'm tired of the ignorant and the foolish (you are among their number) trying to shoehorn me into their little morality play.
You continually demonstrate you lack any substantial knowledge on the subject as The official report of The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission" reveals the collusion that took place with the regulator so improvements would not be put in place, precisely because the same beleif system in the safety of Nuclear Power that you maintain affected all of the safety proposals put forward within and by TEPCO.
Note all the vague talk for "the backup generators didn't start when they were most needed". Sure, there may have been this regulatory "collusion" or perhaps rather that TEPCO and the regulators had to overlook certain regulations in order for Japanese society to function, but that doesn't mean that adhering to regulation would have resulted in the backup generators starting when they needed to.
I don't know whether this report is an honest attempt to seek the truth of the matter or merely another hollow ritual for assigning blame. But I see how you use it.
Regulation doesn't in itself magically create a safe environment. Dysfunctional regulation, by which I mean regulation that is impossible to follow and simultaneously operate a nuclear plant, is IMHO prevalent throughout industry in the developed world. In such circumstances, the regulator has to overlook or ignore certain sorts of regulation violations in order for the plant to function at all, much less in a safe manner. I consider such regulation harmful enough that it can actually make risky activities less safe.
I don't see that as a cause for the Fukushima accident, even remotely. What I do see as causes are things like too narrow a horizon for worst case scenarios, not spotting a single point of failure, and the inability to build safer nuclear plants so that old riskier ones can be decommissioned.
While some could be addressed and probably will be by regulation improvements, the fundamental problem is that society remains wildly risk ignorant. For some people, nuclear power is scary while a slow societal death from arbitrarily pushing up the cost of basic infrastructure (like a power system) isn't.
The belief that the re
Maybe everyone should do the responsible thing and simply not go to college if they can't afford it without debt. Surely the genius of free market will figure out how to run a modern economy with population not educated beyond high school level.
I pretty much agree with this even though you were trying to be sarcastic. Making a bunch of educated people with lots of debt and poor ability to pay it off is not an improvement.
Yes your obviously unique stiuation
Obviously uniquely shared by thousands of fellow students.
Everyone should go to your school and pay no effictive Tuition.
Protip: that means you're paying a lot less money as a result. Maybe everyone should be going to schools like that.
apparently there are limits on how much an individual student may borrow, but not on how much the school can charge
Thanks for the link. I wonder if those limits get adjusted each year for education-related inflation?
This reminds me of the NASA New Start Inflation Index. It's supposed to be an estimate of inflation particular to aerospace projects that NASA is involved with. The problem comes in that it also gets used to adjust costs estimates for future NASA projects which in turn affects the index in the future. As a result there's a feedback in the index that causes it to grow faster than normal producer inflation by a great amount.
But in order to work N95 respirators need to be professionally fitted to each person's individual face to make sure there is a tight seal with no leaks.
Only if you are trying to comply with US regulations, say because you work at Stanford University (the source of the linked document). Since any hypothetical "professional" fitters in China would not be complying with US regulation, there's no guarantee that they would fit properly. It would have been better to link to generic fitting instructions for the masks in question as that would actually be useful.
If I'm sorting stuff lexicographically, I generally use bin sort (often grouping things into four or so large bins first like say A-G, H-M, N-S, and T-Z for sorts on people's surnames). For numerical records, I use merge sort. Sometimes I use both, like for sorting cards (bin sort on suit and then merge sort each suit). It can be quite a time saver when you have to sort a large number of paper records to learn these sorting algorithms.
I suppose what could make this story more interesting is what sort of nontrivial algorithms do people use on a regular basis in a non-programming situation?