Basically this "supercharged" the stock market with billions of new dollars flowing in, the market exploded in growth...then the jobs all got sent overseas, people stopped putting money into 401Ks and 403Bs because they didn't have it or it wasn't offered (the "temp job generation") and so the government rather than let the bubble burst started putting fed printed money straight into the market.
So in other words, Reagan didn't start this mess. The response to jobs getting sent overseas (something which was going to happen no matter who was in office) did. For example, the increase in stock market volume (which your video makes a big deal about) occurred mostly during the Clinton era (especially, the thrift savings plan stage).
As for the cost to clean up Fukushima? Can we PLEASE stop blaming nuclear power for what is in reality a case of corporate and government malfeasance please?
What malfeasance? Can we please stop blaming corporations and governments for what is in reality a natural disaster?
It was SUPPOSED to have been shut down years ago, it wasn't
That's because the new reactors that were to replace Fukushima all were canceled in the decade around 2000. You can't replace a reactor with nothing.
The negotiations for Japans surrender started before the bombs were dropped.
No, they didn't. As the other replier noted, there were factions at this point. Some members of one faction were attempting negotiations for surrender, but they didn't have the authority to surrender. And if one looks at actual battles at the end of the war, where whole Japanese forces fought to the last few men, one doesn't see a propensity to surrender.
It's like saying you were in a car crash. If you crash at 10 kmh/mph or 30 kmh/mph, you still crashed.
But the difference in speed is material. You ignore here material differences between the two accidents. Similarly, I could slip down the stairs. That's an "accident". So:
Chernobyl - accident.
Me slipping down stairs - accident.
Key difference - nobody is going to be that concerned about me.
Now, what highly alarming deduction am I supposed to be drawing here? You seemed to have difficulty articulating that.
No offense, but your words indicate you aren't thinking. The previous poster gave a great example and all you can talk about is radioactivity.
The/only/ difference is the enrichment process and rate of decay.
And intent. One device is used to power cities. The other device is used to destroy cities and other infrastructure. Conflating the two is irrational.
I don't think it's more of a sensitivity thing as more as of 'Actually, we know exactly how devastating this is, not something simulated or based on statistic, we actually know first hand, and maybe shouldn't do this'
I take it you're not actually paying attention to the actual damage from Fukushima. I think there's a great case to be made to decommission or refurbish old nuclear plants to make them safer, but Fukushima demonstrates that at least Japan is responsible enough to run nuclear power.
Analogy? I wanted to have something really clever to compare it to.
This often causes me to go against the grain slightly but I don't believe that adding fuel to the fire is okay because someone added more fuel prior.
I disagree. Argument via reduction to absurdity is a valid and useful tool, especially for the sort of argument we're seeing in the comments to this story.
but when something goes wrong with a hydro dam, somewhere as far as Japan, you don't end up with radiation in the snow on the west coast of Canada.
But you do on occasion end up with a lot of dead people which is a considerably worse outcome than being able to detect slightly larger trace amounts of radioactive isotopes in Canadian snow. And hydroelectric dams displace more land than nuclear reactor accidents do.
I really do hope things aren't that bad as they say.
For people who make a career of crying "wolf", it almost never is as bad as they say.
And human greed didn't force Japan to burn 50 billion dollars. They could have spent considerably less for pretty much the same outcome.
The money we've spent cleaning up the few nuclear problems we've had in the short time nuclear power has been around could have gone a long long LONG way to something much cleaner and safer.
We've spent a lot more than $50 billion on both renewable and safer nuclear energy technologies. It's not simply a matter of spending a little more money.
There's tritium which happens anywhere that there's exposure to cosmic rays (it is created at higher concentrations at higher altitudes due to more cosmic rays reaching the lower atmosphere). It bioaccumulates. Radon 222 can be inhaled.
Dose makes the poison. You are right to be concerned in that one has to reduce radioactive substances which bioaccumulate to lower concentrations than those radioactive substances that don't. But once you've done that, then that's it.
And the place might not be so good for farming or human habitation for a time, but it's still good for industrial processes, particularly for resumption of nuclear power generation.
Yes. There's the human contribution from coal burning plants (and a bit from the nuclear weapons program and even nuclear plant accidents such as Fukushima). Then there's the natural component - radioactive decay products from uranium (particularly, the gas radon 222, which in turn decays to other highly radioactive products, until one ends up with the stable, but toxic metal, lead 206) and the radioactive isotopes formed from exposure to dangerous cosmic radiation such as tritium and carbon 14 (both easily taken up by biological organisms such as hapless humans and greatly enhancing the harm they do).
But they aren't dropping dead from such exposure in Denver (though solar radiation apparently claims a bunch of victims due to skin cancer) because dose makes the poison.
It's interesting how casual people are about squandering vast sums of money. Sure, eliminating one program like this isn't going to do much. But there's a lot more than just one program like this.
Scientists when they're faced with limited resources, pick and choose what research they do. One doesn't have to be a free market capitalist to be interested in doing activities that not only yield more benefit (in however you decide benefit is defined) than they cost, but also more benefit than alternate uses for the money.
All this pointless yacking about the strawman of immediate monetary return on investment ignores that funding of scientific research is just another economic problem subject to the same rules and constraints as any other human endeavor. To be so profoundly ignorant of economics IMHO makes you the delusional, anti-intellectual.
Well, what sort of missile could they use? The usual military stuff would create too much collateral damage. I suppose they could install a grenade launcher and fire tear gas or smoke though.
Most of the definitions do not require the one(s) with sovereign authority to be part of a government, or even human. If space aliens took over the world, they would be the ones holding sovereign authority
That's still a sentient. The US dollar isn't sentient. And the Fed, which controls the US dollar is in turn tightly controlled by various parties, which in my view makes it not a sovereign either.
Of course, it doesn't help that the Board of Governors of this supposedly independent entity have to be appointed by the President.
Read up on that. The Board of Governors is only part of the governing structure (and the board members can't be removed by the current president). The actual decisions are made by the FOMC which includes 5 members from the twelve regional branches. And once you get to the regional branch level, the private component is much stronger.
What is the meaningful difference between empire and hegemony?
You could have just read the definitions I quoted. An empire is a large region under a single sovereignty or dominated by a single sovereignty. A hegemony is a large region heavily influenced by a single power, but other parties still have a great deal of power.
For example, Europe is generally considered to be part of the US sphere of influence, but the US doesn't have the power to control or dominate them. They exercise all the usual trappings of sovereignty such as maintaining their own militaries, issuing their own currencies, writing their own laws and regulations, pursuing their own national interests, and not paying any taxes or tribute to the US. While they often act in a way that benefits the US, they also often don't do so.
The idiot redneck tea partiers still have the right to own firearms.
What's wrong with people succeeding at keeping rights they feel are important?
Funny how the "dumb" people still have the right they think is important, but the "smart" people seem to have lost all the ones they think is more important.
Funny how the "dumb" people succeed where the "smart" people don't.
150 years ago people made this same argument about public roads in cities -- that we didn't really "need" them. 75 years ago people made this argument about telephone service. Both of those things are now widely accepted as both necessary and generally successful projects.
Acceptance doesn't imply fact. Who actually thinks about that sort of thing? Acceptance is meaningless, if the same people would be accepting private roads and less than universal phone access with the same lack of consideration in an alternate reality?
When I give you a very well known one that you yourself come into contact with are you going to stop arguing, or are you going to continue regardless?
That depends on whether it backs your argument or not. Since you asked, I can think of idealized cases where one can extrapolate from a small number of observations to many, for example, fair coin flips. One doesn't need to flip such a coin on the order of 2^N times to figure out what probability a particular combination of N flips will yield.
They require previous knowledge of the statistical model which happens to apply. In our present case, we don't have that information. We just have the data for 150 years of hurricane trajectories (which also decline in quality as one goes back in time). As a result, you can't make such an extrapolation to considerably longer periods of time, 700 years in our case).
they were used to drop incendiary bombs on forests.
FIFY. The purpose of those planes was primarily for recon. They could do ground attacks, but Japan was really desperate to use them for burning forests.
If you haven nothing useful to say, then "nothing" is a good answer.
If you have no intuitive understanding of risk, no logical argument will change your assumptions.
I have a considerable knowledge of risk. And one relevant thing stands out - risk is not intuitive.
If the idea of possibly inflicting horrible damage to your body for the sake of generating plastic trinkets in your home doesn't concern you
Of course, it doesn't. People have many dangerous things in their homes. Maybe we need to use ventilation when doing 3D printing or even something like vacuum bagging as one might do when sanding advanced composites. Then we can do it.
But I'll note here that no one has actually shown a need for such. Merely saying that nanoparticles are produced tells us nothing about the concentration or toxicity of whatever that happens to be.
But you can't say someone got the statistics wrong because you are unable to count something.
Ok, what wasn't I able to count? I could determine the duration of the sample set (which at best can be stretched to 150 years). I can determine the claimed frequency of the event, 1 in 700 years.
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Basically this "supercharged" the stock market with billions of new dollars flowing in, the market exploded in growth...then the jobs all got sent overseas, people stopped putting money into 401Ks and 403Bs because they didn't have it or it wasn't offered (the "temp job generation") and so the government rather than let the bubble burst started putting fed printed money straight into the market.
So in other words, Reagan didn't start this mess. The response to jobs getting sent overseas (something which was going to happen no matter who was in office) did. For example, the increase in stock market volume (which your video makes a big deal about) occurred mostly during the Clinton era (especially, the thrift savings plan stage).
As a result, Germany imports a lot of its power from elsewhere, such as French nuclear plants or Polish coal burning plants.
As for the cost to clean up Fukushima? Can we PLEASE stop blaming nuclear power for what is in reality a case of corporate and government malfeasance please?
What malfeasance? Can we please stop blaming corporations and governments for what is in reality a natural disaster?
It was SUPPOSED to have been shut down years ago, it wasn't
That's because the new reactors that were to replace Fukushima all were canceled in the decade around 2000. You can't replace a reactor with nothing.
it was SUPPOSED to have been well maintained
And evidence indicates it was well maintained.
The negotiations for Japans surrender started before the bombs were dropped.
No, they didn't. As the other replier noted, there were factions at this point. Some members of one faction were attempting negotiations for surrender, but they didn't have the authority to surrender. And if one looks at actual battles at the end of the war, where whole Japanese forces fought to the last few men, one doesn't see a propensity to surrender.
It's like saying you were in a car crash. If you crash at 10 kmh/mph or 30 kmh/mph, you still crashed.
But the difference in speed is material. You ignore here material differences between the two accidents. Similarly, I could slip down the stairs. That's an "accident". So:
Chernobyl - accident.
Me slipping down stairs - accident.
Key difference - nobody is going to be that concerned about me.
Now, what highly alarming deduction am I supposed to be drawing here? You seemed to have difficulty articulating that.
I don't think that's quite the same.
No offense, but your words indicate you aren't thinking. The previous poster gave a great example and all you can talk about is radioactivity.
The /only/ difference is the enrichment process and rate of decay.
And intent. One device is used to power cities. The other device is used to destroy cities and other infrastructure. Conflating the two is irrational.
I don't think it's more of a sensitivity thing as more as of 'Actually, we know exactly how devastating this is, not something simulated or based on statistic, we actually know first hand, and maybe shouldn't do this'
I take it you're not actually paying attention to the actual damage from Fukushima. I think there's a great case to be made to decommission or refurbish old nuclear plants to make them safer, but Fukushima demonstrates that at least Japan is responsible enough to run nuclear power.
Analogy? I wanted to have something really clever to compare it to.
And you got it.
This often causes me to go against the grain slightly but I don't believe that adding fuel to the fire is okay because someone added more fuel prior.
I disagree. Argument via reduction to absurdity is a valid and useful tool, especially for the sort of argument we're seeing in the comments to this story.
but when something goes wrong with a hydro dam, somewhere as far as Japan, you don't end up with radiation in the snow on the west coast of Canada.
But you do on occasion end up with a lot of dead people which is a considerably worse outcome than being able to detect slightly larger trace amounts of radioactive isotopes in Canadian snow. And hydroelectric dams displace more land than nuclear reactor accidents do.
I really do hope things aren't that bad as they say.
For people who make a career of crying "wolf", it almost never is as bad as they say.
The money we've spent cleaning up the few nuclear problems we've had in the short time nuclear power has been around could have gone a long long LONG way to something much cleaner and safer.
We've spent a lot more than $50 billion on both renewable and safer nuclear energy technologies. It's not simply a matter of spending a little more money.
There's tritium which happens anywhere that there's exposure to cosmic rays (it is created at higher concentrations at higher altitudes due to more cosmic rays reaching the lower atmosphere). It bioaccumulates. Radon 222 can be inhaled.
Dose makes the poison. You are right to be concerned in that one has to reduce radioactive substances which bioaccumulate to lower concentrations than those radioactive substances that don't. But once you've done that, then that's it.
And the place might not be so good for farming or human habitation for a time, but it's still good for industrial processes, particularly for resumption of nuclear power generation.
Yes. There's the human contribution from coal burning plants (and a bit from the nuclear weapons program and even nuclear plant accidents such as Fukushima). Then there's the natural component - radioactive decay products from uranium (particularly, the gas radon 222, which in turn decays to other highly radioactive products, until one ends up with the stable, but toxic metal, lead 206) and the radioactive isotopes formed from exposure to dangerous cosmic radiation such as tritium and carbon 14 (both easily taken up by biological organisms such as hapless humans and greatly enhancing the harm they do).
But they aren't dropping dead from such exposure in Denver (though solar radiation apparently claims a bunch of victims due to skin cancer) because dose makes the poison.
$250 million over 20 years.
It's interesting how casual people are about squandering vast sums of money. Sure, eliminating one program like this isn't going to do much. But there's a lot more than just one program like this.
Scientists when they're faced with limited resources, pick and choose what research they do. One doesn't have to be a free market capitalist to be interested in doing activities that not only yield more benefit (in however you decide benefit is defined) than they cost, but also more benefit than alternate uses for the money.
All this pointless yacking about the strawman of immediate monetary return on investment ignores that funding of scientific research is just another economic problem subject to the same rules and constraints as any other human endeavor. To be so profoundly ignorant of economics IMHO makes you the delusional, anti-intellectual.
Well, what sort of missile could they use? The usual military stuff would create too much collateral damage. I suppose they could install a grenade launcher and fire tear gas or smoke though.
Then the US is definitely an empire
No, because at that point you have to consider the division of sovereignty caused by the federation structure of the US.
All the US states pay taxes to the federal government
I doubt the states themselves pay much in taxes to the federal government. Residents of the states pay taxes.
Most of the definitions do not require the one(s) with sovereign authority to be part of a government, or even human. If space aliens took over the world, they would be the ones holding sovereign authority
That's still a sentient. The US dollar isn't sentient. And the Fed, which controls the US dollar is in turn tightly controlled by various parties, which in my view makes it not a sovereign either.
Of course, it doesn't help that the Board of Governors of this supposedly independent entity have to be appointed by the President.
Read up on that. The Board of Governors is only part of the governing structure (and the board members can't be removed by the current president). The actual decisions are made by the FOMC which includes 5 members from the twelve regional branches. And once you get to the regional branch level, the private component is much stronger.
What is the meaningful difference between empire and hegemony?
You could have just read the definitions I quoted. An empire is a large region under a single sovereignty or dominated by a single sovereignty. A hegemony is a large region heavily influenced by a single power, but other parties still have a great deal of power.
For example, Europe is generally considered to be part of the US sphere of influence, but the US doesn't have the power to control or dominate them. They exercise all the usual trappings of sovereignty such as maintaining their own militaries, issuing their own currencies, writing their own laws and regulations, pursuing their own national interests, and not paying any taxes or tribute to the US. While they often act in a way that benefits the US, they also often don't do so.
Actually, there is a single sovereign authority. That is the authority of the USD.
It's still not a sovereign authority even if you quote a Rothschild.
And the USD is controlled by the US government, a single sovereign entity
It's controlled by the Fed which is a mixed body with power in both private and public hands.
The idiot redneck tea partiers still have the right to own firearms.
What's wrong with people succeeding at keeping rights they feel are important?
Funny how the "dumb" people still have the right they think is important, but the "smart" people seem to have lost all the ones they think is more important.
Funny how the "dumb" people succeed where the "smart" people don't.
150 years ago people made this same argument about public roads in cities -- that we didn't really "need" them. 75 years ago people made this argument about telephone service. Both of those things are now widely accepted as both necessary and generally successful projects.
Acceptance doesn't imply fact. Who actually thinks about that sort of thing? Acceptance is meaningless, if the same people would be accepting private roads and less than universal phone access with the same lack of consideration in an alternate reality?
When I give you a very well known one that you yourself come into contact with are you going to stop arguing, or are you going to continue regardless?
That depends on whether it backs your argument or not. Since you asked, I can think of idealized cases where one can extrapolate from a small number of observations to many, for example, fair coin flips. One doesn't need to flip such a coin on the order of 2^N times to figure out what probability a particular combination of N flips will yield.
They require previous knowledge of the statistical model which happens to apply. In our present case, we don't have that information. We just have the data for 150 years of hurricane trajectories (which also decline in quality as one goes back in time). As a result, you can't make such an extrapolation to considerably longer periods of time, 700 years in our case).
they were used to drop incendiary bombs on forests.
FIFY. The purpose of those planes was primarily for recon. They could do ground attacks, but Japan was really desperate to use them for burning forests.
if a "small" country X can do it, how come a US state Y with ten times the population packed into the same land area is not able to?
If you're talking about Sweden, then it's because that US state is California. It can't even provide basic law enforcement.
Of course statistics works that way.
Then by all means give an example.
Well then, what can I say.
If you haven nothing useful to say, then "nothing" is a good answer.
If you have no intuitive understanding of risk, no logical argument will change your assumptions.
I have a considerable knowledge of risk. And one relevant thing stands out - risk is not intuitive.
If the idea of possibly inflicting horrible damage to your body for the sake of generating plastic trinkets in your home doesn't concern you
Of course, it doesn't. People have many dangerous things in their homes. Maybe we need to use ventilation when doing 3D printing or even something like vacuum bagging as one might do when sanding advanced composites. Then we can do it.
But I'll note here that no one has actually shown a need for such. Merely saying that nanoparticles are produced tells us nothing about the concentration or toxicity of whatever that happens to be.
But you can't say someone got the statistics wrong because you are unable to count something.
Ok, what wasn't I able to count? I could determine the duration of the sample set (which at best can be stretched to 150 years). I can determine the claimed frequency of the event, 1 in 700 years.