People do not consistently act in their self interest. In fact, most of the time they don't: smoking cigarettes and using heroin are obvious examples of serving someone else's interests.
Note that nowhere was it stated that people acted in their LONG TERM self-interest. Getting high and/or feeling good right now may be short-term self-interest, but they're nonetheless self-interest.
Face it, most sports don't qualify as "acting in your own self-interest" if you define "self-interest" as "long term self-interest"...
Those two acts, one of of declaring money speech and removing all limits to corporate spending to lobbying, are blatant acts of treason against the State.
Or not.
Treason is very carefully defined in the Constitution. Neither of those acts, nor both together, qualify as treason.
I'm 25 years old, i dont think its too much to ask to be able to work 32-40 hours a week, have healthcare, my own modest place, a used car, feed myself, pay my bills, internet, phone, car insurance, and have a couple of bucks left over to maybe go out to eat two or three times a month, maybe go to a movie or concert once a month and out for drinks with friends occasionally. Thats all i really want at this point. But even that modest lifestyle is just not a possibility for the majority of people, myself included. I was an assistant store manager at a big box retail store, in charge of a staff of dozens and a store with several million in merchandise, 40-50 hours a week. Im living at home, but even a cheap 1bdr in a non shit neighborhood (nowhere near work) would have been nearly half my monthly takehome.
Let's see...
When I was your age, the internet was something you got if you were in college, maybe. If you weren't, you used a local Fidonet node and were glad to have it.
Brand new cars back then weren't as good as the 12 year old car I'm driving now.
I could go on, no doubt. But you might be starting to understand - it's not that we can work less and live the way we do now. We can work less and live the way we did in the 70's - no cable, no DSL, no computer, cars that are, by modern standards, deathtraps, no cell phones, no microwave, etc, etc, etc.
Or we work as much as ever, and have a great many more "things" that we couldn't even imagine back then.
So pick your poison - live like you would've HAD to live in 1975, or accept that you're working harder to maintain a significantly higher standard of living (a standard that you don't even recognize as "higher", since you can't conceive of living without the things you have now).
Okay, Pearl Harbour, perhaps? I'm not American, so I'm not sure which incident would do that best.
Nope.
Hell, be a member of the Nazi Party? No problem.
Ditto the Klan. Or the Communist Party.
Say what you like about whomever...
Unless you threaten them, of course. That's getting into criminal areas. Secret Service will visit if you threaten the Pres, at least till they decide you're a harmless net-troll....
Why is it so hard to accept that overpopulation, which has been evidenced in biological and microbiological systems time and time again, does not become its own population control when it comes to the human race?
Because the rate of population growth is declining worldwide?
Because, more specifically, the rate of population growth in the "advanced" countries has gone NEGATIVE? Absent immigration from the third world, of course.
Seems that the data tends to suggest that if we raise the entire world's standard of living to the level of Europe and the USA (yes, and Canada too), the population decline would accelerate (since the entire population growth of those areas is due to immigration - if the immigrants weren't making babies any faster than we are, then it's unlikely they'd be exporting their surplus population....
why not do it immediately for humanity and the planet's survival?
Let's see. Best guesstimate of cost worldwide would be about $3,000,000,000,000. Or more, since it would likely require a fair amount of infrastructure investment just to get construction equipment to a lot of the places you'd need to move it to build the system.
Not counting a suitable electrical grid to move the power from where it's generated to where it'll be used. Which won't be peanuts.
Geothermal is too close to being "free energy" for most to consider.
Not even close. Geothermal costs about as much as any other source of electricity right now, and maintenance costs can't be ignored...
Well, they can be, for the first decade or so after you sink that shaft. After that, having to resink that shaft because the old shaft corroded away from having cool water pumped into it and boiling water pumped out for a few decades won't be trivial...
Note, by the by, that adjusting the pH of the water used to control corrosion will work fine, right up until time the pH-adjusted water leaks into the groundwater somewhere.
You do realize that people are in fact living, and thriving, out here in these dark colors, don't you?
Have you ever looked at a population density map of the USA?
People do indeed live out there. But most of the people in the USA don't. Get away from the Northeast, the West Coast, and Texas, and you're looking at no more than 20% of the US population living in ~80% of the land are of the USA.
2. "disproportionately" doesn't describe what you're comparing it to. I'm guessing it's the cost of nuclear power, factoring in the average cost per KwH, the incidence of accidents, and the average cost per accident, but that's little more than a guess.
You'd be wrong.
Main reason nuclear is unpopular is that people are phobic about the word "nuclear".
By pretty much any metric, nuclear is safer and cheaper (especially when you consider those externalities like carbon emissions) than coal/oil/hydro, etc.
What gets it in trouble is the legal problems you get when you want to build a plant (announce a location, and a herd of lawyers descend upon you with injunctions demanding that you not build here, for any value of here).
Plus there's the laws that say you can't actually do anything with spent fuel rods except park them right next to the plant, so that if anything bad happens, the effect is magnified by the pile of old fuel rods OUTSIDE the containment dome....
Which latter is a side-effect of the NIMBYism inherent in the army of lawyers descending to prevent construction of a nuclear power plant here (for any value of here)....
One can decrease oil consumption by replacing those cars which run on oil with cars which run on electricity.
One can do that.
But until one brings the price of electric cars down to at or below the price of gasoline/diesel cars, and simultaneously brings the performance/range up to or above the performance of gasoline/diesel cars, it won't happen.
Nickel-iron fission, right? Sigh... the whole thing is a big spinning metal magnet orbiting another big spinning metal magnet. The torque created rotates the core. Don't you think a spinning core would produce a lot of heat from friction?
Might.
On the other hand, don't you think there might be a metric buttload of uranium down there, doing radioactive decay for billions of years?
How much geothermal needs to be moved in order to get 30 PWh of energy..yes PWh.
Say, about 20 TW, depending on the efficiency of the process. Could be as high as 30 (quite possible, but not too likely), or as low as 10 (barely possible).
So, yes, we'd be extracting it faster than it was being generating it within a very short time.
Or does everyone really think that China, India, and the rest of the world are going to continue to live in squalor just so we can maintain our standard of living?
As to how long before it's a problem? A few million years, probably.
Note that the above assumes no fundamental problems with geothermal. Nothing unforeseen, like, say, AGW (which certainly wasn't foreseen when we began burning coal centuries ago).
From the pool of old fuel rods (NOT the reactors), we have 5kg of Cesium.
Plus a lot of Xenon. The Xenon release has a half life of ~126 hours. So, March 11 to today...
That leaves 0.000000000000074 of the original amount left. Or about 1MBq....
Oddly enough, most of this release seems to have happened as a side-effect of a complete lack of reprocessing of spent fuel rods, since they'd have been shipped off for reprocessing if that had been legal....
If there's less work to do, we need to improve the quality of life per unit of work ratio to keep people from falling into poverty simply because there's no work for them to do.
This has already been going on for decades. Certainly MY quality of life is higher than it was even ten years ago.
On the other hand, you are correct in implying that it's not proceeding quickly enough. As automation acceptance rates accelerate, the process of "improving quality of life per unit of work" has to accelerate at least as quickly, or bad things happen....
Until we get under 3-4 billion, I wouldn't worry about population shrinkage,
You should.
Social Security (and the European equivalents) are based on the assumption that we have a lot of young workers for every elderly person so supported.
Population decline due to lower birthrates (which is what we expect to be seeing later this century) rather turns that on its head, as the number of new workers to support the elderly drops faster than the elderly do.
This is Slashdot, so anything that could be construed as anti-nuclear (which, apparently even measuring radiation in Tokyo is here . ..), will be modded to hell.
No, measuring radiation isn't "anti-nuclear".
On the other hand, measuring radiation is often pointless, especially when the people doing the measuring (quite likely you, if you're doing it) don't know what the measurements they get really mean.
If, as an example, one of the hotspots they've reported in the Tokyo area were in my back yard, I'd probably plant a monstera on it, to remind myself not to mow the spot. Then I'd ignore it - I don't eat monstera, I won't be mowing it, and I don't lie down under the things.
, so I was trying to be subtle . .
That was about as subtle as slapping someone with a catfish....
Note, by the way, that if you REALLY want to panic about hotspots, I won't do anything to stop you. I will, however, point at you and laugh at the fool panicking over nothing....
When they talk about "radiation hot spots", they're not talking about anything that will be a problem unless you're standing on it 24/7 for a decade or so.
But, to provide more detail, alpha isn't a problem unless you eat the emitter (or inhale it), beta isn't a problem unless the emitter is in contact with your bare skin, and gamma can be a problem, assuming you live next to it for a while....
I'm not sure why you brought them up, not sure why you asserted I'd never used them?
Because you seemed to be asserting that the "normal" mode of acquiring goods implied paying for them before you took legal possession of them.
Fact is, the most common modes of acquiring goods in use today in the USA have you carrying the goods (whatever they are) home before the person selling them to you has your money in hand.
Obvious exceptions are drug deals, of course, and similar criminal activities.
But most of us, most of the time, are taking things home from stores before the stores have the money.
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Note that nowhere was it stated that people acted in their LONG TERM self-interest. Getting high and/or feeling good right now may be short-term self-interest, but they're nonetheless self-interest.
Face it, most sports don't qualify as "acting in your own self-interest" if you define "self-interest" as "long term self-interest"...
Or not.
Treason is very carefully defined in the Constitution. Neither of those acts, nor both together, qualify as treason.
Let's see...
When I was your age, the internet was something you got if you were in college, maybe. If you weren't, you used a local Fidonet node and were glad to have it.
Brand new cars back then weren't as good as the 12 year old car I'm driving now.
I could go on, no doubt. But you might be starting to understand - it's not that we can work less and live the way we do now. We can work less and live the way we did in the 70's - no cable, no DSL, no computer, cars that are, by modern standards, deathtraps, no cell phones, no microwave, etc, etc, etc.
Or we work as much as ever, and have a great many more "things" that we couldn't even imagine back then.
So pick your poison - live like you would've HAD to live in 1975, or accept that you're working harder to maintain a significantly higher standard of living (a standard that you don't even recognize as "higher", since you can't conceive of living without the things you have now).
Nope.
Hell, be a member of the Nazi Party? No problem.
Ditto the Klan. Or the Communist Party.
Say what you like about whomever...
Unless you threaten them, of course. That's getting into criminal areas. Secret Service will visit if you threaten the Pres, at least till they decide you're a harmless net-troll....
So, what he proposes doing is taking 21 systems that currently work, and replacing them with something that, based on history, won't work?
Good rule of thumb - even if it looks inefficient, if it works, LEAVE IT ALONE!
After you've fixed everything that does NOT work, then you can start streamlining the things that work but aren't as efficient as you might like.
Because the rate of population growth is declining worldwide?
Because, more specifically, the rate of population growth in the "advanced" countries has gone NEGATIVE? Absent immigration from the third world, of course.
Seems that the data tends to suggest that if we raise the entire world's standard of living to the level of Europe and the USA (yes, and Canada too), the population decline would accelerate (since the entire population growth of those areas is due to immigration - if the immigrants weren't making babies any faster than we are, then it's unlikely they'd be exporting their surplus population....
Let's see. Best guesstimate of cost worldwide would be about $3,000,000,000,000. Or more, since it would likely require a fair amount of infrastructure investment just to get construction equipment to a lot of the places you'd need to move it to build the system.
Not counting a suitable electrical grid to move the power from where it's generated to where it'll be used. Which won't be peanuts.
Not even close. Geothermal costs about as much as any other source of electricity right now, and maintenance costs can't be ignored...
Well, they can be, for the first decade or so after you sink that shaft. After that, having to resink that shaft because the old shaft corroded away from having cool water pumped into it and boiling water pumped out for a few decades won't be trivial...
Note, by the by, that adjusting the pH of the water used to control corrosion will work fine, right up until time the pH-adjusted water leaks into the groundwater somewhere.
Have you ever looked at a population density map of the USA?
People do indeed live out there. But most of the people in the USA don't. Get away from the Northeast, the West Coast, and Texas, and you're looking at no more than 20% of the US population living in ~80% of the land are of the USA.
You'd be wrong.
Main reason nuclear is unpopular is that people are phobic about the word "nuclear".
By pretty much any metric, nuclear is safer and cheaper (especially when you consider those externalities like carbon emissions) than coal/oil/hydro, etc.
What gets it in trouble is the legal problems you get when you want to build a plant (announce a location, and a herd of lawyers descend upon you with injunctions demanding that you not build here, for any value of here).
Plus there's the laws that say you can't actually do anything with spent fuel rods except park them right next to the plant, so that if anything bad happens, the effect is magnified by the pile of old fuel rods OUTSIDE the containment dome....
Which latter is a side-effect of the NIMBYism inherent in the army of lawyers descending to prevent construction of a nuclear power plant here (for any value of here)....
One can do that.
But until one brings the price of electric cars down to at or below the price of gasoline/diesel cars, and simultaneously brings the performance/range up to or above the performance of gasoline/diesel cars, it won't happen.
Might.
On the other hand, don't you think there might be a metric buttload of uranium down there, doing radioactive decay for billions of years?
Say, about 20 TW, depending on the efficiency of the process. Could be as high as 30 (quite possible, but not too likely), or as low as 10 (barely possible).
So, yes, we'd be extracting it faster than it was being generating it within a very short time.
Or does everyone really think that China, India, and the rest of the world are going to continue to live in squalor just so we can maintain our standard of living?
As to how long before it's a problem? A few million years, probably.
Note that the above assumes no fundamental problems with geothermal. Nothing unforeseen, like, say, AGW (which certainly wasn't foreseen when we began burning coal centuries ago).
Hmm, looking at the numbers...
From the pool of old fuel rods (NOT the reactors), we have 5kg of Cesium.
Plus a lot of Xenon. The Xenon release has a half life of ~126 hours. So, March 11 to today...
That leaves 0.000000000000074 of the original amount left. Or about 1MBq....
Oddly enough, most of this release seems to have happened as a side-effect of a complete lack of reprocessing of spent fuel rods, since they'd have been shipped off for reprocessing if that had been legal....
This has already been going on for decades. Certainly MY quality of life is higher than it was even ten years ago.
On the other hand, you are correct in implying that it's not proceeding quickly enough. As automation acceptance rates accelerate, the process of "improving quality of life per unit of work" has to accelerate at least as quickly, or bad things happen....
When SSA was put into place, the USA had ~11 workers per retiree drawing benefits.
Now, the number is closer to five.
This will continue, as life expectancy continues to increase and the number of children continues to decline.
You should.
Social Security (and the European equivalents) are based on the assumption that we have a lot of young workers for every elderly person so supported.
Population decline due to lower birthrates (which is what we expect to be seeing later this century) rather turns that on its head, as the number of new workers to support the elderly drops faster than the elderly do.
Actually, the growth rate has been slowing for the last 50 years or so.
Right now, we're looking at only 1.5% growth rate per year, as opposed to the 2% gorwth rate we were seeing in the 60's....
Umm, no.
You added eight years worth of supplemental and emergency appropriations ($900 B) onto last year's military budget.
The same article showed the correct amount to add for this year: $37 billion.
Which would make the correct value $700.3 billion, less than half what you asserted.
No, measuring radiation isn't "anti-nuclear".
On the other hand, measuring radiation is often pointless, especially when the people doing the measuring (quite likely you, if you're doing it) don't know what the measurements they get really mean.
If, as an example, one of the hotspots they've reported in the Tokyo area were in my back yard, I'd probably plant a monstera on it, to remind myself not to mow the spot. Then I'd ignore it - I don't eat monstera, I won't be mowing it, and I don't lie down under the things.
That was about as subtle as slapping someone with a catfish....
Note, by the way, that if you REALLY want to panic about hotspots, I won't do anything to stop you. I will, however, point at you and laugh at the fool panicking over nothing....
When they talk about "radiation hot spots", they're not talking about anything that will be a problem unless you're standing on it 24/7 for a decade or so.
But, to provide more detail, alpha isn't a problem unless you eat the emitter (or inhale it), beta isn't a problem unless the emitter is in contact with your bare skin, and gamma can be a problem, assuming you live next to it for a while....
If the muddy spot bothers you, hose it off.
And good luck with the kids....
Citation?
It should also be noted that the Obama administration has run up more deficit in three years than Bush Jr did in eight.
Citation?
Off the top of my head, I can't recall when we last lost 30% of the world's population. But it wasn't recently....
Because you seemed to be asserting that the "normal" mode of acquiring goods implied paying for them before you took legal possession of them.
Fact is, the most common modes of acquiring goods in use today in the USA have you carrying the goods (whatever they are) home before the person selling them to you has your money in hand.
Obvious exceptions are drug deals, of course, and similar criminal activities.
But most of us, most of the time, are taking things home from stores before the stores have the money.
Read more history.
Both Georgia and Pennsylvania were established as penal colonies.
And Massachusetts and Rhode Island were the only States established by "religious wackos".
Most of them were established by people who wanted to get rich in the New World (tm)....