You think the military funds every project they want, without prioritizing, without compromising ?
You think entitlement spending doesn't involve compromises and prioritization ?
You're asking the wrong questions. Just because "priorities and compromise" is part of the process by which this funding is doled out doesn't mean that this spending would come even close to satisfying a "national interest". Entitlements in particular are notorious for satisfying personal interests at the expense of national interests.
Is it really all that unreasonable for a scientist to write a brief paragraph, about why their research is important, so the people processing the grant proposals have some insight as to whether or not the research provides an immediate benefit ?
If that really is the extent of the law (which I don't believe is the case), then they already do that.
Or are the things that you would like to see changed, not affected by unintended consequences, but the things that you would like to not see changed, might have unintended consequences ?
The obvious rebuttal here is that you already see the unintended consequences of not making changes.
I've been on record before in criticizing most publicly funded research, but that's because I think research, basic or otherwise can and should be treated as yet another expenditure of public funds and judged on its perceived merits (and when one does that, publicly funded research doesn't fare too well).
But for the US situation publicly funded research doesn't stand out as particularly broken. The proposal would judge this half a percent or so portion of the US budget far more harshly that the rest of the budget. Military or entitlement spending doesn't receive this sort of attention. That's two thirds of US spending right there.
Finally, what's really going to happen here that changes how public funding gets spent? Superficially, it's just more overhead to rationalize the research in the context of the proposed bill. That strikes me as a complete waste of effort. Plus, it may toss in unintended consequences that mess up the whole system.
That's why I made the logical jump to the conclusion that you were implying that if Hitler hadn't had NSA-style surveillance authority Anne Frank would have lived.
[...]
The thing that makes guys like Hitler special isn't that they have massive surveillance powers, it's that they grant themselves other powers that make massive surveillance a total waste of time.
[...]
I've never said that these programs shouldn't be stopped, but if you insist that a court wrongly granting a warrant is the first step to Hitler you should probably be on anti-psycotic drugs.
[...]
I can name you a proven case of actual voter suppression. I tried to vote today, but since my ID was stolen I couldn't.
[...]
Unfortunately for you the actual dictionary defines any government regulator as a "cop," therefore local officials count.
Each quote above illustrates a gaping error in logic, reason, or is just plain wrong. I see no point in continuing this discussion. Here's one final attempt for your edification, I'll summarize my viewpoint.
For the first quote about Anne Frank, your argument is not at all logical because it doesn't follow at all from what I wrote. I even corrected you, but you still insisted on this bizarre claim. I can't help you here. If you can't understand what I actually wrote, we can't communicate.
My point was that totalitarian governments rely on surveillance. Something like the NSA's discussed operations would be highly valuable. The absence of such a program didn't save Anne Frank, but its presence might have caught even more people like her. Nazi Germany used surveillance both in Germany and in its subjugated lands to find and weed out undesirable ethnic groups and dissidents.
I also find your bizarre fixation on Godwin's law to be ridiculous. Nazi Germany is an excellent example of where this sort of official lawbreaking can go.
Third, when government has such wholesale disregard for the law and the property of the people, then it makes totalitarian governments easier to implement. Do I as you claim think that wrongly granting a warrant is a "first step"? No. I think it is an intermediate step.
You've already started inching towards tyranny by the point that warrants are given under unlawful circumstances. That indicates to me that the original complaint that you didn't "understand freedom" has been confirmed once again.
As to your claim that your vote was suppressed, it's painfully clear that you didn't care enough to try to vote despite that minor hurdle. I can't be bothered to care about your frivolous excuses for not voting. You only need to look in the mirror to see who is responsible for the suppression of your vote.
Finally, your erroneous claim about the definition of "cop" (as a government regulator rather than as a law enforcement officer) was irrelevant since the people handling voter rolls and such aren't government regulators.
In conclusion, you've made a number of logical errors and showed considerable ignorance of the subject at hand. That would be excusable, if you had shown any interest in correcting your faults.
A shut down reactor will produce for minimum 90 days enough heat to be still be able to melt down.
Again you display your ignorance. Most reactors in the world employ passive cooling after shutdown so that the reactor doesn't get that hot.
Hint: that is what happened in Fukushima: cooling failed, and 3 shut down reactors melted.
Fukushima was of an older design that didn't have the capability to passive cool. When it lost power to its active cooling (after the battery backup ran out of juice), then it started to overheat.
They seem to spend too much time with "jobs" rather than demanding bigger wages. Let's take those away so that those Indians have more time to spend laser-focused on our real problems.
Now suppose I had turned this problem around and asked whether Saudi Arabia should interfere with the developed world, particularly the US? The US exerts considerable influence over the area even to the point of toppling governments.
But as it turns out, the US has a good sized Muslim population both from immigration and converts. And most of those go on Hajj to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. There's considerable opportunity to win "hearts and minds" with positive propaganda there.
Saudi Arabia also has considerable wealth which can be used for political bribes or covert campaign contributions (for example, millions of small donations under $100 to US candidates) which the candidate need not know even come from Saudi Arabia. They can boycott products and services from various countries.
Is it worth the effort to influence a far larger and more powerful country which continually meddles in your region? It seems to me that yes, it is worth that effort.
Ah, but would the Iraqis have such an edge over their neighbors if the US (well, the West as whole) didn't help them in the first Iran-Iraq war?
There's that oil. I used Iraq as an example, but Iran, Egypt, and the rest of the region has similar potential. The fundamental problem here is simply that part of the world has a lot of highly valuable oil concentrated into a relatively small amount of real estate. That allows the rulers to accumulate quite a bit of power.
And there's not much, aside from the interests of outsiders to keep the key oil bearing parts from falling under control of one ruler.
I'm not connected to high tech like I was during the dotcom days, but it strikes me that this bubble is still a bit immature. What I see as somewhat more concerning is the wide variety of things that are getting overvalued, such as high tech stocks, renewable energy, bonds (due to central bank quantitative easing), and a couple of US-centric things (higher education loans and the coming health insurance market).
I think any bubbles and their bursts will be moderate in size and effect until a lot of people find ways to leverage the hell out of one or more of these things. Then it'll be full blown tulipmania. But I think that'll take some time to set up politically and financially.
In the meantime, I wouldn't go dumping your nest egg into Yahoo. It's also possible in several different ways to lose your shirt on the stock market and still end up paying capital gains tax. I point this particular thing out because it's clear from the talk that a lot of people think of bubble collapses in a particular way (asset goes up to a high unsustainable price and then falls). Unfortunately, such bubbles can fail in a number of exciting ways.
On the plus side, if there is a high tech collapse, there probably won't be any "too big to fail" firms in there.
Or, alternatively, he almost succeeded because Kuwait had weak defenses and inadequate local alliances since the Kuwaitis expected the Americans to bail them out.
It wouldn't have mattered if Kuwait was expecting a bail out or not. They were in a losing position no matter what they had, excluding perhaps some nuclear weapons. Too few people and a bad tactical position means they would have lost anyway.
It's worth noting that Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula is just as bad off militarily. That's what Iraq would have steamrolled next. Then after Iraq built a few fission bombs, it'd be time for the second Iraq-Iran war.
So, you think your projections are better, or more informed?
More informed? Perhaps not, but definitely better. From that link (to a March 2010 story) I wrote the following:
What's really ugly about this is that the CBO is on Obama's side (via Democrat control of Congress). It's likely that the CBO has had to make a number of rosy assumptions (like accepting the administration's claim that war costs will drop to $50 billion per year over the long term) that lessen the estimated size of the deficits.
Googling around it appears that the cost of funding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is just shy of $100 billion.
Also, compare the CBO's 2010 projection to its 2009 projection. The deficits for FY 2010 and 2011 have increased substantially. That isn't GWB's fault.
At this point, I'm betting that we won't see an Obama budget with a deficit below a trillion dollars and the relatively low figures for 2012-2015 will turn out to be completely unrealistic without some serious budget cutting or an extremely vigorous economy.
The 2012-2013 fiscal year didn't look so bad with a deficit about $140 billion greater than projections, but I was right on the previous two fiscal years. We'll see about the next two years.
For remarks, I don't see significant spending reductions or tax increases for the next couple of years. In addition, I think increased war spending (both Iraq and Afghanistan are getting a bit worse at this point) and Obamacare (the considerable health insurance subsidy and revenue reduction due to turmoil from the employer mandate) will load the deficit.
Obamacare is a big uncertainty for me at the moment. Currently, I believe it will fail hard, but over what time frame remains to be seen. I'm leaning towards 10 years before the problems get bad enough that the law is completely changed (not necessarily in a good way) rather than just incrementally fixed.
If we were no longer there to impose our will, the squabbling would likely stop as the countries in the region realized that they really had to deal directly with each other, and had to live with the consequences of their actions.
Let us keep in mind that there is considerable upside for some parties to some of those consequences, such as controlling up to half the world's proven oil reserves as Saddam Hussein attempted to do in the 80s and early 90s. He didn't succeed because the US organized a coalition against him.
Unfortunately, the grown up version doesn't have either the harmlessness or insignificance of your analogy.
Vacuum doesn't help you with heat dissipation. What I wonder is whether hydrogen would be even more effective since it is even lighter? I guess it'd react with the metals in the hard drive (eg, hydrogen embrittlement) and have even more leakage problems.
Which is fine, but how do you solve the problem of students defaulting en masse upon graduation, leading to no more student loans being made?
What is the problem supposed to be here? Bankruptcy doesn't magically get you out of ever having to pay your debt. As you note, they'll soon be making $100+k per year. Creditors and a bankruptcy judge would have that in mind.
Ask the people who have tritium in their water supply about our civilian nuclear reactors.
Even in the absence of nuclear bomb tests and nuclear plants, we would still have tritium in our water supplies from underground radioactive decay, the solar wind, and cosmic rays.
Glancing at your link, it says that the worst contamination was 2 million picocuries per liter of water. According to this link, 10 curies is roughly LD50 (lethal dose where 50% of humans would be expected to die). So right there, we have in the worst contaminated sample, a liter of water has roughly 5 million times below LD50. Even if we were to drink two gallons of that water per day for a century, we're still only up to a bit under 1.5 curies of tritium dose at the end of that century. In practice, since tritium is not selectively absorbed over regular hydrogen, it would settle at the same 2 million picocuries per liter of body water (and corresponding incorporated hydrogen in organic molecules). That just isn't a lot of exposure.
Glancing at the Wikipedia page of the chemical composition of the human body, it appears that the human body has 63% hydrogen by number of atoms. That's very close to water. So long term, a 100 kg adult male drinking 2 million picocurie per liter water exclusively would have roughly 200 million picocuries of tritium in his body at all times. That's 50,000 times lower than the LD50 level. Now, that might contribute some to cancers and other such things, but it's pretty damn small as it is.
The problem here is that dose makes the poison, and there just isn't that much dose. I think it's far less significant here that people are exposed to barely detectable levels of radiation and more important that it demonstrates some degree of minor leaking in the system which could be a problem down the road.
That isn't true. They are independent. Who would pay attention to them if they were not independent?
You just did.
I'll just add that CBO deficit projections are one of the areas that they are particularly notorious for getting wrong (2009 CBO economy and deficit projections). For example, in that link they forecast 4% real GDP growth rate for 2011-2014. So far it's been about 2.5% through to this fall. They understated unemployment (6.4% through the same 2011-2014 period, actual average unemployment appears to be a bit under 8% so far, but probably will remain above 7% average when 2014 ends IMHO).
But it's their deficit projections which are off the most. Here's the figures from that report of 2009:
CBO projected deficits in billions of US dollars:
2010 -703
2011 -498
2012 -264
2013 -257
Actual deficits in billions of US dollars:
2010 -1294
2011 -1300
2012 -1087
2013 ~-680 (picked up from news sources)
Notice the problem? How far off these CBO projections are (over 800 billion over for 2010 and 2011!)? I picked this particular report because it was the most important CBO report of the past few years since it was used to justify 2009 stimulus spending and as justification for increase other sorts of spending in 2009 and early 2010.
Now you might think it just a coincidence that the CBO greatly exaggerated the fiscal health of the US budget at a time when it was highly advantageous to Congress to have such an exaggeration. I don't. I think this sort of deceptive propaganda is part of the CBO's reason for being.
The US Navy and its Soviet counterpart remains the only two entities to have left broken nuclear reactors on the ocean floor (unless someone has since picked them up covertly). The US Navy has two such sunken subs and the Russians appear to have several as well.
While the US Navy's more recent safety record appears much better, one can say the same of most civilian nuclear reactors as well.
Both the examples I cited came from regulated, but for-profit, systems.
Both examples show no problems with privately run nuclear plants. You're wasting my time. But having said that, let me quote relevant parts from the article so that you can see for yourself.
From the first article,
At least four years in the works, the changes appear to clash with more recent lessons of last year's reactor crisis in Japan. A mandate that local responders always run practice exercises for a radiation release has been eliminated â" a move viewed as downright bizarre by some emergency planners.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which run the program together, have added one new exercise: More than a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, state and community police will now take part in exercises that prepare for a possible assault on their local plant.
Sounds dubious, but this isn't a private business running amok, but part of the US federal government who you claim have the "safety record". The NRC and FEMA are not "for profit" systems.
From the second article,
According to the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy (DMME), the Virginia Tech Seismological Observatory (VTSO) removed all seismographs from around the plant in the 1990s due to budget cuts.
The plant owner didn't remove these sensors. Virginia Tech did. And while the article doesn't talk about it, I can think of a very good reason why. Earthquake sensors are far more sensitive these days. You don't need a huge bunch of them just to detect and fix the location of even small earthquakes. And Virginia Tech is not a for profit system.
I find your evidence to be embarrassingly irrelevant to any claim you were trying to make here.
So, again, we can talk about how safe nuclear power is when all profit is removed from the equation, and the plants are run by an organization with a real safety record.
Every operator of a nuclear plant has a safety record. That's one of the purposes of nuclear power regulation. And I wager most of those operators have better safety records than the US Navy.
Its sink or swim for ALL of us on this ship of fools.
Except of course, for those who aren't on the ship in the first place. For example, every implementation of Communism created a class of elites who didn't share in the problems they created for the rest of society.
Ultimately, Communism is another variation of the idea of stealing from the rich to give to the poor. But once you put such a thug in power, there's nothing holding them to that promise.
As to my "adventurous economic systems", I think they've worked out pretty well at helping the poor as well as everyone else in society.
There was no ad hominem there. Your ignorance is demonstrated by your post.
That's awesome! Wanna know what happens when the solar plant fails like this? They call it a nice day out. They won't call it that when your thorium pipe dream plant melts the outer casing and shits molten salt and core everywhere.
A core melt doesn't magically follow just because there is a leak or obstruction in the molten salt coolant system. They can just shut down the reactor like any other. It's not some 1960s design that requires active cooling.
The result is that the consequences are the same. The plant operator has to clean up some salts, thaw some pipes, and get the system running again.
It's absolutely a fucking refutation as long as there is profit in nuclear power.
I have a solution. We regulate nuclear power plant operators and you state the fuck away from any decision making authority. "Profit" means the activity is generating net value.
Otherwise everything is an expense that can be cut, like cutting back on evacuation drills or removed earthquake sensors, in order to increase profit.
Slashdot Mirror
You think the military funds every project they want, without prioritizing, without compromising ?
You think entitlement spending doesn't involve compromises and prioritization ?
You're asking the wrong questions. Just because "priorities and compromise" is part of the process by which this funding is doled out doesn't mean that this spending would come even close to satisfying a "national interest". Entitlements in particular are notorious for satisfying personal interests at the expense of national interests.
Is it really all that unreasonable for a scientist to write a brief paragraph, about why their research is important, so the people processing the grant proposals have some insight as to whether or not the research provides an immediate benefit ?
If that really is the extent of the law (which I don't believe is the case), then they already do that.
Or are the things that you would like to see changed, not affected by unintended consequences, but the things that you would like to not see changed, might have unintended consequences ?
The obvious rebuttal here is that you already see the unintended consequences of not making changes.
I've been on record before in criticizing most publicly funded research, but that's because I think research, basic or otherwise can and should be treated as yet another expenditure of public funds and judged on its perceived merits (and when one does that, publicly funded research doesn't fare too well).
But for the US situation publicly funded research doesn't stand out as particularly broken. The proposal would judge this half a percent or so portion of the US budget far more harshly that the rest of the budget. Military or entitlement spending doesn't receive this sort of attention. That's two thirds of US spending right there.
Finally, what's really going to happen here that changes how public funding gets spent? Superficially, it's just more overhead to rationalize the research in the context of the proposed bill. That strikes me as a complete waste of effort. Plus, it may toss in unintended consequences that mess up the whole system.
That's why I made the logical jump to the conclusion that you were implying that if Hitler hadn't had NSA-style surveillance authority Anne Frank would have lived.
[...]
The thing that makes guys like Hitler special isn't that they have massive surveillance powers, it's that they grant themselves other powers that make massive surveillance a total waste of time.
[...]
I've never said that these programs shouldn't be stopped, but if you insist that a court wrongly granting a warrant is the first step to Hitler you should probably be on anti-psycotic drugs.
[...]
I can name you a proven case of actual voter suppression. I tried to vote today, but since my ID was stolen I couldn't.
[...]
Unfortunately for you the actual dictionary defines any government regulator as a "cop," therefore local officials count.
Each quote above illustrates a gaping error in logic, reason, or is just plain wrong. I see no point in continuing this discussion. Here's one final attempt for your edification, I'll summarize my viewpoint.
For the first quote about Anne Frank, your argument is not at all logical because it doesn't follow at all from what I wrote. I even corrected you, but you still insisted on this bizarre claim. I can't help you here. If you can't understand what I actually wrote, we can't communicate.
My point was that totalitarian governments rely on surveillance. Something like the NSA's discussed operations would be highly valuable. The absence of such a program didn't save Anne Frank, but its presence might have caught even more people like her. Nazi Germany used surveillance both in Germany and in its subjugated lands to find and weed out undesirable ethnic groups and dissidents.
I also find your bizarre fixation on Godwin's law to be ridiculous. Nazi Germany is an excellent example of where this sort of official lawbreaking can go.
Third, when government has such wholesale disregard for the law and the property of the people, then it makes totalitarian governments easier to implement. Do I as you claim think that wrongly granting a warrant is a "first step"? No. I think it is an intermediate step.
You've already started inching towards tyranny by the point that warrants are given under unlawful circumstances. That indicates to me that the original complaint that you didn't "understand freedom" has been confirmed once again.
As to your claim that your vote was suppressed, it's painfully clear that you didn't care enough to try to vote despite that minor hurdle. I can't be bothered to care about your frivolous excuses for not voting. You only need to look in the mirror to see who is responsible for the suppression of your vote.
Finally, your erroneous claim about the definition of "cop" (as a government regulator rather than as a law enforcement officer) was irrelevant since the people handling voter rolls and such aren't government regulators.
In conclusion, you've made a number of logical errors and showed considerable ignorance of the subject at hand. That would be excusable, if you had shown any interest in correcting your faults.
A shut down reactor will produce for minimum 90 days enough heat to be still be able to melt down.
Again you display your ignorance. Most reactors in the world employ passive cooling after shutdown so that the reactor doesn't get that hot.
Hint: that is what happened in Fukushima: cooling failed, and 3 shut down reactors melted.
Fukushima was of an older design that didn't have the capability to passive cool. When it lost power to its active cooling (after the battery backup ran out of juice), then it started to overheat.
They seem to spend too much time with "jobs" rather than demanding bigger wages. Let's take those away so that those Indians have more time to spend laser-focused on our real problems.
Now suppose I had turned this problem around and asked whether Saudi Arabia should interfere with the developed world, particularly the US? The US exerts considerable influence over the area even to the point of toppling governments.
But as it turns out, the US has a good sized Muslim population both from immigration and converts. And most of those go on Hajj to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. There's considerable opportunity to win "hearts and minds" with positive propaganda there.
Saudi Arabia also has considerable wealth which can be used for political bribes or covert campaign contributions (for example, millions of small donations under $100 to US candidates) which the candidate need not know even come from Saudi Arabia. They can boycott products and services from various countries.
Is it worth the effort to influence a far larger and more powerful country which continually meddles in your region? It seems to me that yes, it is worth that effort.
Ah, but would the Iraqis have such an edge over their neighbors if the US (well, the West as whole) didn't help them in the first Iran-Iraq war?
There's that oil. I used Iraq as an example, but Iran, Egypt, and the rest of the region has similar potential. The fundamental problem here is simply that part of the world has a lot of highly valuable oil concentrated into a relatively small amount of real estate. That allows the rulers to accumulate quite a bit of power.
And there's not much, aside from the interests of outsiders to keep the key oil bearing parts from falling under control of one ruler.
I'm not connected to high tech like I was during the dotcom days, but it strikes me that this bubble is still a bit immature. What I see as somewhat more concerning is the wide variety of things that are getting overvalued, such as high tech stocks, renewable energy, bonds (due to central bank quantitative easing), and a couple of US-centric things (higher education loans and the coming health insurance market).
I think any bubbles and their bursts will be moderate in size and effect until a lot of people find ways to leverage the hell out of one or more of these things. Then it'll be full blown tulipmania. But I think that'll take some time to set up politically and financially.
In the meantime, I wouldn't go dumping your nest egg into Yahoo. It's also possible in several different ways to lose your shirt on the stock market and still end up paying capital gains tax. I point this particular thing out because it's clear from the talk that a lot of people think of bubble collapses in a particular way (asset goes up to a high unsustainable price and then falls). Unfortunately, such bubbles can fail in a number of exciting ways.
On the plus side, if there is a high tech collapse, there probably won't be any "too big to fail" firms in there.
Or, alternatively, he almost succeeded because Kuwait had weak defenses and inadequate local alliances since the Kuwaitis expected the Americans to bail them out.
It wouldn't have mattered if Kuwait was expecting a bail out or not. They were in a losing position no matter what they had, excluding perhaps some nuclear weapons. Too few people and a bad tactical position means they would have lost anyway.
It's worth noting that Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula is just as bad off militarily. That's what Iraq would have steamrolled next. Then after Iraq built a few fission bombs, it'd be time for the second Iraq-Iran war.
So, you think your projections are better, or more informed?
More informed? Perhaps not, but definitely better. From that link (to a March 2010 story) I wrote the following:
What's really ugly about this is that the CBO is on Obama's side (via Democrat control of Congress). It's likely that the CBO has had to make a number of rosy assumptions (like accepting the administration's claim that war costs will drop to $50 billion per year over the long term) that lessen the estimated size of the deficits.
Googling around it appears that the cost of funding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is just shy of $100 billion.
Also, compare the CBO's 2010 projection to its 2009 projection. The deficits for FY 2010 and 2011 have increased substantially. That isn't GWB's fault.
At this point, I'm betting that we won't see an Obama budget with a deficit below a trillion dollars and the relatively low figures for 2012-2015 will turn out to be completely unrealistic without some serious budget cutting or an extremely vigorous economy.
The 2012-2013 fiscal year didn't look so bad with a deficit about $140 billion greater than projections, but I was right on the previous two fiscal years. We'll see about the next two years.
For remarks, I don't see significant spending reductions or tax increases for the next couple of years. In addition, I think increased war spending (both Iraq and Afghanistan are getting a bit worse at this point) and Obamacare (the considerable health insurance subsidy and revenue reduction due to turmoil from the employer mandate) will load the deficit.
Obamacare is a big uncertainty for me at the moment. Currently, I believe it will fail hard, but over what time frame remains to be seen. I'm leaning towards 10 years before the problems get bad enough that the law is completely changed (not necessarily in a good way) rather than just incrementally fixed.
because it's an underground currency that doesn't have any reliable defining body
What do you mean by "defining body"? I googled it, but all I got was cosmetics. Your shampoo has "defining body".
Even if that were so, the NYPD should answer those requests, if only to say that they can't honor them.
If we were no longer there to impose our will, the squabbling would likely stop as the countries in the region realized that they really had to deal directly with each other, and had to live with the consequences of their actions.
Let us keep in mind that there is considerable upside for some parties to some of those consequences, such as controlling up to half the world's proven oil reserves as Saddam Hussein attempted to do in the 80s and early 90s. He didn't succeed because the US organized a coalition against him.
Unfortunately, the grown up version doesn't have either the harmlessness or insignificance of your analogy.
Vacuum doesn't help you with heat dissipation. What I wonder is whether hydrogen would be even more effective since it is even lighter? I guess it'd react with the metals in the hard drive (eg, hydrogen embrittlement) and have even more leakage problems.
You mean like the one percenters who don't suffer when they close a factory in Michigan and ship those jobs off to the Far East?
Or the 99 percenters in the Far East who get better jobs because that factory moved. Yes, I mean those sorts of people.
The fact is while the last ten years may have been shit for the rest of society, for them those were the best years they've had since the Gilded Age.
I guess someone has to do something about those 19th century problems. That's what we have conservatives for.
Which is fine, but how do you solve the problem of students defaulting en masse upon graduation, leading to no more student loans being made?
What is the problem supposed to be here? Bankruptcy doesn't magically get you out of ever having to pay your debt. As you note, they'll soon be making $100+k per year. Creditors and a bankruptcy judge would have that in mind.
Ask the people who have tritium in their water supply about our civilian nuclear reactors.
Even in the absence of nuclear bomb tests and nuclear plants, we would still have tritium in our water supplies from underground radioactive decay, the solar wind, and cosmic rays.
Glancing at your link, it says that the worst contamination was 2 million picocuries per liter of water. According to this link, 10 curies is roughly LD50 (lethal dose where 50% of humans would be expected to die). So right there, we have in the worst contaminated sample, a liter of water has roughly 5 million times below LD50. Even if we were to drink two gallons of that water per day for a century, we're still only up to a bit under 1.5 curies of tritium dose at the end of that century. In practice, since tritium is not selectively absorbed over regular hydrogen, it would settle at the same 2 million picocuries per liter of body water (and corresponding incorporated hydrogen in organic molecules). That just isn't a lot of exposure.
Glancing at the Wikipedia page of the chemical composition of the human body, it appears that the human body has 63% hydrogen by number of atoms. That's very close to water. So long term, a 100 kg adult male drinking 2 million picocurie per liter water exclusively would have roughly 200 million picocuries of tritium in his body at all times. That's 50,000 times lower than the LD50 level. Now, that might contribute some to cancers and other such things, but it's pretty damn small as it is.
The problem here is that dose makes the poison, and there just isn't that much dose. I think it's far less significant here that people are exposed to barely detectable levels of radiation and more important that it demonstrates some degree of minor leaking in the system which could be a problem down the road.
That isn't true. They are independent. Who would pay attention to them if they were not independent?
You just did.
I'll just add that CBO deficit projections are one of the areas that they are particularly notorious for getting wrong (2009 CBO economy and deficit projections). For example, in that link they forecast 4% real GDP growth rate for 2011-2014. So far it's been about 2.5% through to this fall. They understated unemployment (6.4% through the same 2011-2014 period, actual average unemployment appears to be a bit under 8% so far, but probably will remain above 7% average when 2014 ends IMHO).
But it's their deficit projections which are off the most. Here's the figures from that report of 2009:
CBO projected deficits in billions of US dollars:
2010 -703
2011 -498
2012 -264
2013 -257
Actual deficits in billions of US dollars:
2010 -1294
2011 -1300
2012 -1087
2013 ~-680 (picked up from news sources)
Notice the problem? How far off these CBO projections are (over 800 billion over for 2010 and 2011!)? I picked this particular report because it was the most important CBO report of the past few years since it was used to justify 2009 stimulus spending and as justification for increase other sorts of spending in 2009 and early 2010.
Now you might think it just a coincidence that the CBO greatly exaggerated the fiscal health of the US budget at a time when it was highly advantageous to Congress to have such an exaggeration. I don't. I think this sort of deceptive propaganda is part of the CBO's reason for being.
The US Navy and its Soviet counterpart remains the only two entities to have left broken nuclear reactors on the ocean floor (unless someone has since picked them up covertly). The US Navy has two such sunken subs and the Russians appear to have several as well.
While the US Navy's more recent safety record appears much better, one can say the same of most civilian nuclear reactors as well.
Both the examples I cited came from regulated, but for-profit, systems.
Both examples show no problems with privately run nuclear plants. You're wasting my time. But having said that, let me quote relevant parts from the article so that you can see for yourself. From the first article,
At least four years in the works, the changes appear to clash with more recent lessons of last year's reactor crisis in Japan. A mandate that local responders always run practice exercises for a radiation release has been eliminated â" a move viewed as downright bizarre by some emergency planners.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which run the program together, have added one new exercise: More than a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, state and community police will now take part in exercises that prepare for a possible assault on their local plant.
Sounds dubious, but this isn't a private business running amok, but part of the US federal government who you claim have the "safety record". The NRC and FEMA are not "for profit" systems.
From the second article,
According to the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy (DMME), the Virginia Tech Seismological Observatory (VTSO) removed all seismographs from around the plant in the 1990s due to budget cuts.
The plant owner didn't remove these sensors. Virginia Tech did. And while the article doesn't talk about it, I can think of a very good reason why. Earthquake sensors are far more sensitive these days. You don't need a huge bunch of them just to detect and fix the location of even small earthquakes. And Virginia Tech is not a for profit system.
I find your evidence to be embarrassingly irrelevant to any claim you were trying to make here.
So, again, we can talk about how safe nuclear power is when all profit is removed from the equation, and the plants are run by an organization with a real safety record.
Every operator of a nuclear plant has a safety record. That's one of the purposes of nuclear power regulation. And I wager most of those operators have better safety records than the US Navy.
Its sink or swim for ALL of us on this ship of fools.
Except of course, for those who aren't on the ship in the first place. For example, every implementation of Communism created a class of elites who didn't share in the problems they created for the rest of society.
Ultimately, Communism is another variation of the idea of stealing from the rich to give to the poor. But once you put such a thug in power, there's nothing holding them to that promise.
As to my "adventurous economic systems", I think they've worked out pretty well at helping the poor as well as everyone else in society.
Nice ad hominim there.
There was no ad hominem there. Your ignorance is demonstrated by your post.
That's awesome! Wanna know what happens when the solar plant fails like this? They call it a nice day out. They won't call it that when your thorium pipe dream plant melts the outer casing and shits molten salt and core everywhere.
A core melt doesn't magically follow just because there is a leak or obstruction in the molten salt coolant system. They can just shut down the reactor like any other. It's not some 1960s design that requires active cooling.
The result is that the consequences are the same. The plant operator has to clean up some salts, thaw some pipes, and get the system running again.
You should learn to distinguish between interfaces and implementations.
Don't worry, I have. I just have copious evidence that Communism is an interface that should never be implemented at the national or global level.
It's absolutely a fucking refutation as long as there is profit in nuclear power.
I have a solution. We regulate nuclear power plant operators and you state the fuck away from any decision making authority. "Profit" means the activity is generating net value.
Otherwise everything is an expense that can be cut, like cutting back on evacuation drills or removed earthquake sensors, in order to increase profit.
That's why you have regulation.
Because the training facility is in Florida along with the helmets and airplanes.