I take it you think there's a problem here? My view is that non profits are an excellent place for parasites to thrive since there's no real accountability aside from whatever donors happen to impose. Donors are merely getting wise to what's been happening over the past few decades to the non profit sector.
So how about for a change instead of trying to shoehorn human behavior into some sort of arbitrary "moral ideal", we instead take a good hard look at what we actually are, and adjust our sociological and moral norms to be in line with our basic natures.
What makes you think we haven't done this already? There is some need to restrain "basic nature" behavior such as theft, rape, murder, etc. And any such rule set is going to be somewhat arbitrary in how it is constructed.
And a buffer state for Russia. After all, one of the original Cold War reasons for supporting Turkey was to deny Russia unrestricted access to the Mediterranean.
How many fake pictures can be passed around before people get that those things can be faked? I see such things greatly diluting the value of propaganda.
Employing engineers here on earth to develop technology and iron out the bugs, and send it up on the next flight that is going anyway?
What else would you rather do with those millions?
Spend it on something more useful. Opportunity cost is commonly ignored in discussion of public spending.
For example, if my post were higher profile, for some reason, we'd probably have a replier come on here to claim that because the US squanders billions on military spending, it should squander millions on poor technology development approaches. Such non sequiturs are common when one doesn't understand that there are choices not made as a result of the spending in question.
How many experiments have gone up on pure theory alone and never have real world payouts?
It's worth noting both that the answer in the real world, not the ISS, is "not many" and second, when scientists have limited resources with which to do science, they pick and choose which science they do. The only time this argument even occurs is when someone tries to spend more of other peoples' money without providing an actual reason for doing so.
It should be a warning sign when one appeals to the blue sky science approach.
Given that Nuclear power has only been around like 60 years while other sources of power like coal have been around over 300 Nuclear still has plenty of time to catch up in accidents.
The point is that it hasn't started to. 60 years is enough time to evaluate the frequency of serious accidents and devise counters to those problems as they appear.
However, the real reason for requiring the regulator to have enough money is to ensure that they can hire higher-end technical experts to really challenge the utilities.
Where do these higher-end technical experts come from? In the case of nuclear power, they come from the industry and/or the military. No one else has experience running nuclear reactors.
There's admittedly a harder problem to solve pointed at by Fukushima: how do you prevent "regulatory capture"?
I see no indication that this harder problem was "pointed at" by Fukushima. I noticed that a lot of people want to shoehorn the Fukushima accident into the usual narratives. I do as well though my narratives tend to be unpopular.
Why should we be blaming regulatory capture here? What should have been done, that wasn't done because of regulatory capture?
I rather blame the sluggishness of large bureaucracies and the fact that the Fukushima reactors were near obsolescence. Bureaucracies don't turn on a dime. Just because evidence was out there that the standards for tsunami protection were inadequate doesn't mean that sea walls instantly grow higher or generators get moved off of a lower floor. There's a lot of decision making and paper shuffling that has to happen before one can even begin to address such a problem.
Moving on, the Fukushima reactors were near the end of their operating lifespan (one reactor had originally been scheduled to start the decommissioning process that very month). Where's the case to be made that we should do all this expensive refitting for a plant that'll only be operating for a few more months to years?
Let us see. Tsunami can be a major disaster also from smaller earthquakes
Those require special conditions, such as the earthquake triggering a nearby landslide. Something has to provide the energy and direct that energy against the nuclear plant. At that point, the solution is to not put nuclear plants in particularly dangerous locations which can suffer tsunami beyond any practical height for a barrier.
These would include: plans for evacuation in potentially affected areas if an accident indeed happens.
Already have those plans. One could see them in action with the response to the Fukushima accident.
Another thing - waste - were is all the waste to go.
Recycle it. Then bury what isn't practical to recycle.
I happen to think "we" spend too much public funds on war, education, medicine, and so-called "productive outreach". Each of those expenditures just goes to various special interest groups while simultaneously providing at best a weak benefit (and in the case of the military, occasionally substantial harm) for the people that the spending supposedly benefits.
Now, I imagine you'd like less spent on war and more on the rest. But my take is that every political gain is balanced by a payoff to the parties that could block it. So those benefits to education, medicine, etc come at the price of military spending and other activities that you don't approve of.
Why? I think a simpler solution given your opinion is to wait until others have used nuclear weapons. Then your argument becomes obsolete and we can have a rational discussion of what to do with them.
That's where you would be wrong. It has been discovered that Fukushima was damaged by the quake and the damage contributed to the problems they had cooling the reactors in the aftermath.
There were several reactors affected by the earthquake. Sure, keep them offline until they've been inspected. The problem here is that all of the reactors were taken offline, including the ones not affected by the earthquake. Planning and inspection of Fukushima is not in any way hindered by those other reactors resuming operation.
As a result there are new rules and things which previously were not considered safety critical or in need of regular checks now are. This is where this issue stems from and the reason why it is taking a long time to get things re-started. Checks had to be thought up to counter the new problems that were discovered, then tested out and finally rolled out with monitoring of compliance.
You don't need reactors off line in order to decide on and implement these policies. Plus, nuclear reactors are naturally taken off line for refueling and maintenance. Any safety upgrades on the reactor itself can be implemented then.
But they do happen, so you still need to plan for them...
You don't need to halt reactors in order to plan. A number of reactors weren't harmed and were in working condition. There was no reason to stop operating them for a year.
Unfortunately Japan seems to easily forget about Fukushima and its effects, side effects and future effects.
I see no indication of this.
The new Japanese government is in favor of a drastic change regarding power plants future: from an all-stopped-and-deep-check (May 6, 2012) to a lets-go-restart-asap-what-you-can policy.
Why do you consider that a worse approach? There's never been a safety or engineering justification for a "all-stopped-and-deep-check" approach. Magnitude 9 earthquakes don't happen all the time and that was a fundamental cause of the Fukushima accident.
They probably estimate the probability of another such F-event very low (F as in Fukushima, but you can put what you want here).
Given that only one "F-event" has happened in the history of nuclear power, I think it is fair to consider the probability of such events to be very low.
This is one of the globalization problem: economical globalization trend, without global consensus on fundamental issues.
No, it is common sense risk management taking over. There's no safety reason to slow down the restarting of well maintained nuclear reactors. And there's plenty of costs to such delays.
And I have to roll my eyes at "global consensus". I think Japan wouldn't be satisfied with the sort of compromises that it'd have to do in order to reach a consensus with say, Russia, the US, and China, all who appear to take some sort of short cuts with respect to nuclear power.
For example, Russia still operates a few reactors of the sort that failed at Chernobyl (and will continue to do so, for at least a decade). China is notorious for its disregard for human health. And the US has a number of oversight issues (and NIMBY politics) hampering the safety of its reactors. A "global consensus" isn't going to be the best practices possible, but rather an ugly compromise.
And people wonder why the average person hates the very idea of the stock market.
Because if stock markets didn't exist, then rich people wouldn't have a way to pay/bribe governments for services rendered. I imagine the average person doesn't hate so much the wealth that they've received from stock markets. It kind of makes their hate a bit meaningless.
It mostly seems like he's prone to passing "nanny state" laws
Veneration of the state, distrust of democracy, and dislike of free market capitalism in one fell swoop. If the state is a necessary evil, then you wouldn't be inclined to give it the power to regulate the size of soda cups. If you trusted democracies and the people who made up the democracy, then you wouldn't be inclined to regulate how much soda they can drink at one time. You might be inclined to fund education efforts, but that's far less intrusive.
And of course, if you liked free markets, then it is likely that you'd see huge soda cups as a market innovation serving a legitimate customer need and give no more thought to it.
and has also been involved with some corruption allegations
Corporate syndicalism especially his new taxi schemes that mandate particular brands for taxis and his alleged taxi hailing service.
Sure, he isn't engaging in lethal proscription/assassination of his enemies or the other over-the-top stuff that characterizes the more famous of fascist governments, but he has all the basic characteristics of a fascist dictator. He just doesn't have the power of a fascist dictator.
and the key feature that distinguished Hitler and Mussolini from other merely despotic dictatorships was the use of scare tactics and targeted assassinations.
So what is an example of a despotic dictatorship that doesn't indulge in the use of scare tactics and targeted assassinations? Rule by fear is the rule not the exception.
Citibank didn't arrest the protesters. The police did. And they did so because the protesters were trespassing. Just because you have legitimate reasons for being in a space doesn't allow you to protest there.
Second, in the Citibank case there might be a case of police overstepping their authority (the claim there is that the protesters tried to comply with orders to leave, but were prevented from doing so), but in that case, it is the police doing the overstepping not the business.
But what if you have a bias that you are not aware of? Have you ever taken an implicit association test? Are you sure that you could counter a bias that you are not even aware of?
I think here the answer is yes. If the bias is in any way relevant, it will eventually manifest in a way that can be consciously observed, if not by Dunbal (let's say due to the insidious nature of "unconscious"), then by a coworker or patient. He has to be aware, receptive, and willing to try to change himself. I think he's already demonstrated that.
But the problem with such subtle biases is that they don't necessarily manifest in a harmful way. And we already know that due to our limitations we will have biases.
Things like implicit association tests can show biases, but you already indicated that some of these are hard to impossible to change. It is possible that it might even be undesirable to succeed in removing such deeply embedded biases since they might require changes in how we think and that might have a worse outcome than leaving those biases, such as they are, in place.
What's not obvious about transportation helping you survive in the modern world?
Nice try. I said basic survival and comfort.
The modern world is far beyond basic survival and comfort. You're changing the scenario. Now that is setting up a strawman.
Well, if we're speaking of the modern world rather than some scenario, then basic survival alone requires a lot of technology. And as you note, the modern world is far beyond basic survival. So why should either of us bother to waste words on your scenario.
Why do people think the answer to such big problems is "learning"? What can we "learn" that will prevent AGW, for example, without actually having to do any further work?
And to be honest, I damn well hope we get it right on this marble before we start polluting everywhere else like the virus that we resemble.
What incentive is there to "get it right"? Earth is an easy place to live. Space is not. Space has the incentives to get things right that you feel we need.
Slashdot Mirror
I take it you think there's a problem here? My view is that non profits are an excellent place for parasites to thrive since there's no real accountability aside from whatever donors happen to impose. Donors are merely getting wise to what's been happening over the past few decades to the non profit sector.
So how about for a change instead of trying to shoehorn human behavior into some sort of arbitrary "moral ideal", we instead take a good hard look at what we actually are, and adjust our sociological and moral norms to be in line with our basic natures.
What makes you think we haven't done this already? There is some need to restrain "basic nature" behavior such as theft, rape, murder, etc. And any such rule set is going to be somewhat arbitrary in how it is constructed.
They are also a needed conter-weight to Iran
And a buffer state for Russia. After all, one of the original Cold War reasons for supporting Turkey was to deny Russia unrestricted access to the Mediterranean.
How many fake pictures can be passed around before people get that those things can be faked? I see such things greatly diluting the value of propaganda.
The accused was not a member to the conversation that they recorded. Neither party was notified of the recording.
Employing engineers here on earth to develop technology and iron out the bugs, and send it up on the next flight that is going anyway? What else would you rather do with those millions?
Spend it on something more useful. Opportunity cost is commonly ignored in discussion of public spending.
For example, if my post were higher profile, for some reason, we'd probably have a replier come on here to claim that because the US squanders billions on military spending, it should squander millions on poor technology development approaches. Such non sequiturs are common when one doesn't understand that there are choices not made as a result of the spending in question.
Again, you need to test whether it works or not first. And this sort of experiment is very cheap compared to doing anything on the ISS.
How many experiments have gone up on pure theory alone and never have real world payouts?
It's worth noting both that the answer in the real world, not the ISS, is "not many" and second, when scientists have limited resources with which to do science, they pick and choose which science they do. The only time this argument even occurs is when someone tries to spend more of other peoples' money without providing an actual reason for doing so.
It should be a warning sign when one appeals to the blue sky science approach.
Given that Nuclear power has only been around like 60 years while other sources of power like coal have been around over 300 Nuclear still has plenty of time to catch up in accidents.
The point is that it hasn't started to. 60 years is enough time to evaluate the frequency of serious accidents and devise counters to those problems as they appear.
However, the real reason for requiring the regulator to have enough money is to ensure that they can hire higher-end technical experts to really challenge the utilities.
Where do these higher-end technical experts come from? In the case of nuclear power, they come from the industry and/or the military. No one else has experience running nuclear reactors.
There's admittedly a harder problem to solve pointed at by Fukushima: how do you prevent "regulatory capture"?
I see no indication that this harder problem was "pointed at" by Fukushima. I noticed that a lot of people want to shoehorn the Fukushima accident into the usual narratives. I do as well though my narratives tend to be unpopular.
Why should we be blaming regulatory capture here? What should have been done, that wasn't done because of regulatory capture?
I rather blame the sluggishness of large bureaucracies and the fact that the Fukushima reactors were near obsolescence. Bureaucracies don't turn on a dime. Just because evidence was out there that the standards for tsunami protection were inadequate doesn't mean that sea walls instantly grow higher or generators get moved off of a lower floor. There's a lot of decision making and paper shuffling that has to happen before one can even begin to address such a problem.
Moving on, the Fukushima reactors were near the end of their operating lifespan (one reactor had originally been scheduled to start the decommissioning process that very month). Where's the case to be made that we should do all this expensive refitting for a plant that'll only be operating for a few more months to years?
Let us see. Tsunami can be a major disaster also from smaller earthquakes
Those require special conditions, such as the earthquake triggering a nearby landslide. Something has to provide the energy and direct that energy against the nuclear plant. At that point, the solution is to not put nuclear plants in particularly dangerous locations which can suffer tsunami beyond any practical height for a barrier.
These would include: plans for evacuation in potentially affected areas if an accident indeed happens.
Already have those plans. One could see them in action with the response to the Fukushima accident.
Another thing - waste - were is all the waste to go.
Recycle it. Then bury what isn't practical to recycle.
I happen to think "we" spend too much public funds on war, education, medicine, and so-called "productive outreach". Each of those expenditures just goes to various special interest groups while simultaneously providing at best a weak benefit (and in the case of the military, occasionally substantial harm) for the people that the spending supposedly benefits.
Now, I imagine you'd like less spent on war and more on the rest. But my take is that every political gain is balanced by a payoff to the parties that could block it. So those benefits to education, medicine, etc come at the price of military spending and other activities that you don't approve of.
Why? I think a simpler solution given your opinion is to wait until others have used nuclear weapons. Then your argument becomes obsolete and we can have a rational discussion of what to do with them.
That's where you would be wrong. It has been discovered that Fukushima was damaged by the quake and the damage contributed to the problems they had cooling the reactors in the aftermath.
There were several reactors affected by the earthquake. Sure, keep them offline until they've been inspected. The problem here is that all of the reactors were taken offline, including the ones not affected by the earthquake. Planning and inspection of Fukushima is not in any way hindered by those other reactors resuming operation.
As a result there are new rules and things which previously were not considered safety critical or in need of regular checks now are. This is where this issue stems from and the reason why it is taking a long time to get things re-started. Checks had to be thought up to counter the new problems that were discovered, then tested out and finally rolled out with monitoring of compliance.
You don't need reactors off line in order to decide on and implement these policies. Plus, nuclear reactors are naturally taken off line for refueling and maintenance. Any safety upgrades on the reactor itself can be implemented then.
But they do happen, so you still need to plan for them...
You don't need to halt reactors in order to plan. A number of reactors weren't harmed and were in working condition. There was no reason to stop operating them for a year.
Unfortunately Japan seems to easily forget about Fukushima and its effects, side effects and future effects.
I see no indication of this.
The new Japanese government is in favor of a drastic change regarding power plants future: from an all-stopped-and-deep-check (May 6, 2012) to a lets-go-restart-asap-what-you-can policy.
Why do you consider that a worse approach? There's never been a safety or engineering justification for a "all-stopped-and-deep-check" approach. Magnitude 9 earthquakes don't happen all the time and that was a fundamental cause of the Fukushima accident.
They probably estimate the probability of another such F-event very low (F as in Fukushima, but you can put what you want here).
Given that only one "F-event" has happened in the history of nuclear power, I think it is fair to consider the probability of such events to be very low.
This is one of the globalization problem: economical globalization trend, without global consensus on fundamental issues.
No, it is common sense risk management taking over. There's no safety reason to slow down the restarting of well maintained nuclear reactors. And there's plenty of costs to such delays.
And I have to roll my eyes at "global consensus". I think Japan wouldn't be satisfied with the sort of compromises that it'd have to do in order to reach a consensus with say, Russia, the US, and China, all who appear to take some sort of short cuts with respect to nuclear power.
For example, Russia still operates a few reactors of the sort that failed at Chernobyl (and will continue to do so, for at least a decade). China is notorious for its disregard for human health. And the US has a number of oversight issues (and NIMBY politics) hampering the safety of its reactors. A "global consensus" isn't going to be the best practices possible, but rather an ugly compromise.
And people wonder why the average person hates the very idea of the stock market.
Because if stock markets didn't exist, then rich people wouldn't have a way to pay/bribe governments for services rendered. I imagine the average person doesn't hate so much the wealth that they've received from stock markets. It kind of makes their hate a bit meaningless.
It mostly seems like he's prone to passing "nanny state" laws
Veneration of the state, distrust of democracy, and dislike of free market capitalism in one fell swoop. If the state is a necessary evil, then you wouldn't be inclined to give it the power to regulate the size of soda cups. If you trusted democracies and the people who made up the democracy, then you wouldn't be inclined to regulate how much soda they can drink at one time. You might be inclined to fund education efforts, but that's far less intrusive.
And of course, if you liked free markets, then it is likely that you'd see huge soda cups as a market innovation serving a legitimate customer need and give no more thought to it.
and has also been involved with some corruption allegations
Corporate syndicalism especially his new taxi schemes that mandate particular brands for taxis and his alleged taxi hailing service.
Sure, he isn't engaging in lethal proscription/assassination of his enemies or the other over-the-top stuff that characterizes the more famous of fascist governments, but he has all the basic characteristics of a fascist dictator. He just doesn't have the power of a fascist dictator.
and the key feature that distinguished Hitler and Mussolini from other merely despotic dictatorships was the use of scare tactics and targeted assassinations.
So what is an example of a despotic dictatorship that doesn't indulge in the use of scare tactics and targeted assassinations? Rule by fear is the rule not the exception.
Citibank didn't arrest the protesters. The police did. And they did so because the protesters were trespassing. Just because you have legitimate reasons for being in a space doesn't allow you to protest there.
Second, in the Citibank case there might be a case of police overstepping their authority (the claim there is that the protesters tried to comply with orders to leave, but were prevented from doing so), but in that case, it is the police doing the overstepping not the business.
But what if you have a bias that you are not aware of? Have you ever taken an implicit association test? Are you sure that you could counter a bias that you are not even aware of?
I think here the answer is yes. If the bias is in any way relevant, it will eventually manifest in a way that can be consciously observed, if not by Dunbal (let's say due to the insidious nature of "unconscious"), then by a coworker or patient. He has to be aware, receptive, and willing to try to change himself. I think he's already demonstrated that.
But the problem with such subtle biases is that they don't necessarily manifest in a harmful way. And we already know that due to our limitations we will have biases.
Things like implicit association tests can show biases, but you already indicated that some of these are hard to impossible to change. It is possible that it might even be undesirable to succeed in removing such deeply embedded biases since they might require changes in how we think and that might have a worse outcome than leaving those biases, such as they are, in place.
What's not obvious about transportation helping you survive in the modern world?
Nice try. I said basic survival and comfort.
The modern world is far beyond basic survival and comfort. You're changing the scenario. Now that is setting up a strawman.
Well, if we're speaking of the modern world rather than some scenario, then basic survival alone requires a lot of technology. And as you note, the modern world is far beyond basic survival. So why should either of us bother to waste words on your scenario.
And to be honest, I damn well hope we get it right on this marble before we start polluting everywhere else like the virus that we resemble.
What incentive is there to "get it right"? Earth is an easy place to live. Space is not. Space has the incentives to get things right that you feel we need.
A. the modifications made the thing more likely to jam than to fire.
Same with the Liberator and it's not going to have the same penetration power.
B. controlling a rifle in full auto fire is a sonofabitch.
Those bullets go somewhere. Some, more than what a Liberator would fire, would go at police officers and some will go towards bystanders.