Finally! A real citation. Not a complete one, mind you, since you only provide a citation for automobile related deaths, not alcohol related deaths.
Note, by the way, that I have yet to argue that stopping drunk driving is not a perfectly rational societal goal.
so, assuming the "1/3 alcohol related" actually means "1/3 caused by people who were driving and over the legal limit for alcohol" (that's certainly not the way it's used around here, so I'll assume it's a problematic translation in other places as well), we're talking about ~14000 drunk drivers killing someone (including themselves, but I don't consider a drunk driver killing himself to be a problem).
Now for the tough part. Has this number been affected statistically by the rates at which DUI checkpoints have been employed (for a start, it might be helpful to know how many drivers have been ticketted for DUI at any of them), and is there any evidence that iPhone apps announcing the location of these DUI checkpoints have resulted in an increase in drunk driving fatalities? Or have they only caused a decrease in revenues due to fewer tickets issued for DUI?
And I know from watching the news and reading the paper that in my relatively small metro area, a drunk person kills someone almost every single day.
I'm impressed at your local alcohol related death rate. Where I am (metro area with around half a million people), we don't see anywhere near that rate. Actually, from what I see in our papers, our total unlawful death rate isn't up to one person per day, much less our alcohol related deathrate.
Note, by the way, that I wasn't trying to argue based on an anecdote. I just want a citation for the argument that drunk driving kills lots of people, and that DUI roadblocks save lots of lives. Haven't seen one yet.
I do know that drunk driving IS a huge problem and these checkpoints do save a lot of lives.
Citation?
I agree drunk driving is a bad thing. But frankly, I've never seen any real evidence it's as endemic as you suggest. I've been driving for almost 40 years, and I can only recall seeing ONE (1) guy who was almost certainly drunk while driving (he was going east on the westbound half of a divided highway in the middle of the night).
It's virtually certain that there were other drivers who'd had a drink or three near me on the road in that time, but none that were obvious enough to pick out from the usual fraction of sucky drivers you find everywhere.
Nobody has leaked the positions of nuclear subs to the public, though.
True enough.
However (there's always a however)..
Way back during Desert Storm, the US military allowed reporters to embed with various military units.
On the first night of the ground war, there was a reporter reporting on international TV (CNN), with camera footage, that the tank battalion he was with had moved up from their start line to the edge of a berm in Kuwait.
The reporter even went so far as to say (on international TV, remember) that the Iraqis weren't aware that the unit had moved up, since the Iraqis were still shelling the units start position.
Needless to say, the Iraqis didn't stay ignorant of that particular unit's position for very long, what with the camera footage showing the position of the tanks, and the reporter reporting the fall of shot relative to their position (in the Army, the guy who does that is called a Forward Observer - so this CNN reporter was effectively acting as a forward observer for Iraqi artillery)....
So, yes, every once in a while, secrets are made public that put people's lives on the line.
A standard size house block of land 50km away from the nearest cbd here costs approximately $300k-400k AUD (about $330k-440k USD) _without_ even a house on it.
Then you have problems with where you live. Where I live, my house cost considerably less than your price for an empty lot, and I'm about 10km from the cbd.
If you asked somebody in 2007 what the chances of a major economic meltdown as a result of a housing price decline, every economist would have said "super low - it will never happen."
Hmm, a couple years before that time, three or four of us at work were nattering about the second home that one of us had bought for resale.
I said something to the effect that "It's getting so housing prices are so high that people can't afford to buy houses to live in, and that's going to cause problems in the housing market by and by - hard to sell a house if noone can afford to buy it".
One of my coworkers (not the guy who had just bought the house) said "Never happen. housing prices don't go down"
I looked at my coworkers nodding their heads to this, and decided right then that investing in the housing market was an insane idea, and went home and paid off my mortgage the next day.
So while every economist might have said "never happen", at least some normal people could see the writing on the wall farther back than that....
For all that he spent a couple trillion dollars (that we couldn't afford) to "fix the economy", unemployment has hardly budged (shades of FDR, who did the same thing, with the same result).
Guantanamo is still open (admittedly, I never thought he had a chance in hell of actually closing that, since noone wanted the inhabitants of same in their country (including us), and the only other way to close it would have been to kill all the people held there).
Health Care Reform. If Obama had been serious about healthcare reform, all he had to do was lower the age of eligibility of Medicare to zero. Alternatively, he could do the same thing gradually by lowering the age of eligibility by one or two years every year till it was zero. Plus increase Medicare taxes to match the extra load on the system
Instead, he tells the Congress to do the work, provides them no guidelines whatsoever, and signs off on the first thing they come up with. Which was almost guaranteed to be bad, since Congress is far more interested in changing laws to encourage campaign contributions (or threatening to change laws to encourage campaign contributions) than in "fixing" healthcare.
Note that a good marker to how good "Obamacare" is is the number of waivers that have been granted for it already. If it were really a good thing, then there'd not be much need for waivers for every group that campaigned in favour of the bill....
Instead of refueling a battery, you change the whole battery every time you stop at a "gas" station. The system has been used for gas cans for decades now and it works.
Trick is, a natural gas tank is just a can full of natural gas. and 30 pounds of natural gas is pretty much like any 30 pounds of natural gas.
Batteries, on the other hand, age. As they get older, they hold less energy. So, you take your brand new battery (which you paid a pretty penny for when you bought your new electric car, and which will take your car 200+ miles), and swap it for a five-year-old battery which only holds enough energy for 150 miles. Or 100 miles, if it's a cheap knockoff. Or less, perhaps.
As long as not all batteries are identical in performance, hot-swapping them will only be popular with people who currently have crappy batteries...
but with twisters bearing down on the usa's conservative areas, conservatives have no more reason to doubt climate fears, and a solid incentive to make sure the atmosphere is less violent, which means less warm, which means less CO2, which means changes in their politics
one can hope, at least, that the twisters are a wake up call for some about climate change. it doesn't mean balmy weather, it means atmospheric violence
Since these particular tornadoes seem to be a side-effect of the disappearance of La Nina, it's unlikely that it'll convince many people other than the True Believers.
Face it, tornadoes happen every year. A lot of them happen every year. You don't read about it so much since most of them do their thing in open country, not over towns, but they're an every year thing.
And seeing a perfectly normal event (a tornado) doesn't usually cause people to go "Ahh!!! The Sky is falling!!! Global Warming is REAL!!! Ahh!!!".
The "free market" would not hesitate to see you and your children die from a readily curable disease because you cannot afford the proprietary medicine, developed with taxpayer funds that you paid.
Note, of course, that taxpayer funded research isn't actually the "free market" in action.
The "free market" would gladly give your child a cupful of mercury to drink if it meant a little bump in quarterly stock prices.
Oddly enough, that's not the "free market" either. Limited liability corporations are another creation of government.
The free market would not hesitate to eliminate every "heirloom seed" on earth if it meant that they would be paid a license fee for every morsel of food that goes on your family's table.
And, oddly enough, neither is this. Note that monopolies are one antithesis of the "free market". And they're usually government induced as well.
On the other Hand, building 1.6 Mio. wind turbines is the cheapest viable alternative. Germany alone already has about 22.000 of them, and they are profitable.
So, about five wind turbines per km^2 over all of Germany?
The mortality from Chernobyl is 200.000 out of 55 mio,
It should, perhaps, be pointed out that Greenpeace's 200K deaths are not ACTUAL deaths, they are still EXPECTED deaths. One of these days, we might reach 200K deaths as a result of Chernobyl.
"The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the United States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles."
Of course, what this quote doesn't actually show is that the wargames in question were held east of Midway Island (A US possession), which is rather more than 2500 miles from Japan.
A better comparison might be the Japanese Navy doing wargames on the other side of Midway (about 2500 miles from the USA). Even then, the comparison would be stretching things a bit, since the Japanese didn't actually own anything in the Pacific that was terribly close to Midway.
Note also that a similar comparison might be the British Navy holding wargames in the Atlantic 2500 miles from the USA. Near Ireland, basically....
Then what's the point of having it on board, when the majority of accidents happen during takeoff or landing?
Well, as to that, if I'm ever in a plane-crashing-disaster-movie sort of situation on take-off or landing, I'm really hoping the pilot isn't up from flipping through the manual at the time....
Often, it's the fuel and not the spacecraft that makes up the bulk of the launch mass.
Often??
Actually, since mass ratio to reach LEO is about 10, it's fairly safe to say that fuel is "the bulk of the launch".
Hint: Mass ratio is the number you multiply the empty mass of a launch vehicle (or any other spacecraft) by to get mass with fuel. So typical launch vehicles are more than 90% fuel....
Agreed that standards of living are main determinant of birthrates, but China's birthrates are well below what one would expect given their GDP/capita.
Can't argue with this. Nonetheless, China's birthrates are well ABOVE "one child per family" birthrates.
You can tell this because China's population is INCREASING, rather than decreasing.
Note that "one child per family" would put birthrate at less than 50% of replacement rate, and result in a population decline of >50% per generation, if it were actually followed.
t was my impression that even when scrammed there's enough self-reacting of a "spent" fuel rod that it takes weeks or months for the temperature to decrease to where you can remove it from a vessel, even to move to the pond to continue cooling until it's "cold".
It largely depends on the age of the reactor core. An older core contains more longer lived isotopes than a younger core.
That said, it doesn't take months to cool it down, even with an old core. A few weeks, tops.
since they got kicked out of homes they lost millions of yen for.
A couple things to note:
most of the people were forced to leave by the tsunami before they could be kicked out as a result of the Fukushima incident.
Two million yen is about what I paid for my house, and my house is nothing special, really. Remember, 500 yen is almost enough to cover a Big Mac and fries.
While they may not get cancer for another 40 years because of this, the economic statistics won't add up to "nothing".
relative to this, I should note that I spent the last week at the NIH. One of their local newsletter articles included the results of an ongoing survey of possible thyroid cancers among the youth in the immediate area of effect of Chernobyl.
Results? A TOTAL (not increase) of 62 thyroid cancer cases in the relevant population.
Japan has increased by 20 times the permissible level of radiation for schools, to the limits permitted a German nuclear worker.
While I have never bothered to check on the dosage limits allowed to nuclear workers in Germany, it should be pointed out, for reference, that the levels allowed to nuclear workers over here are lower than the levels generally allowed to civilians.
Only a few people have actually died FROM this disaster (although even those deaths are being hushed up when possible.)
Citation?
Only deaths even remotely related to Fukushima I've seen mentioned are a few guys who worked there killed by the tsunami (some of them weren't even at work when they were killed), plus one guy who may have had a heart attack (he was only on his second day of work when he collapsed, and his dosage from his first day was lower than what I got last time I had to climb inside a reactor vessel).
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Finally! A real citation. Not a complete one, mind you, since you only provide a citation for automobile related deaths, not alcohol related deaths.
Note, by the way, that I have yet to argue that stopping drunk driving is not a perfectly rational societal goal.
so, assuming the "1/3 alcohol related" actually means "1/3 caused by people who were driving and over the legal limit for alcohol" (that's certainly not the way it's used around here, so I'll assume it's a problematic translation in other places as well), we're talking about ~14000 drunk drivers killing someone (including themselves, but I don't consider a drunk driver killing himself to be a problem).
Now for the tough part. Has this number been affected statistically by the rates at which DUI checkpoints have been employed (for a start, it might be helpful to know how many drivers have been ticketted for DUI at any of them), and is there any evidence that iPhone apps announcing the location of these DUI checkpoints have resulted in an increase in drunk driving fatalities? Or have they only caused a decrease in revenues due to fewer tickets issued for DUI?
I'm impressed at your local alcohol related death rate. Where I am (metro area with around half a million people), we don't see anywhere near that rate. Actually, from what I see in our papers, our total unlawful death rate isn't up to one person per day, much less our alcohol related deathrate.
Note, by the way, that I wasn't trying to argue based on an anecdote. I just want a citation for the argument that drunk driving kills lots of people, and that DUI roadblocks save lots of lives. Haven't seen one yet.
Citation?
I agree drunk driving is a bad thing. But frankly, I've never seen any real evidence it's as endemic as you suggest. I've been driving for almost 40 years, and I can only recall seeing ONE (1) guy who was almost certainly drunk while driving (he was going east on the westbound half of a divided highway in the middle of the night).
It's virtually certain that there were other drivers who'd had a drink or three near me on the road in that time, but none that were obvious enough to pick out from the usual fraction of sucky drivers you find everywhere.
True enough.
However (there's always a however)..
Way back during Desert Storm, the US military allowed reporters to embed with various military units.
On the first night of the ground war, there was a reporter reporting on international TV (CNN), with camera footage, that the tank battalion he was with had moved up from their start line to the edge of a berm in Kuwait.
The reporter even went so far as to say (on international TV, remember) that the Iraqis weren't aware that the unit had moved up, since the Iraqis were still shelling the units start position.
Needless to say, the Iraqis didn't stay ignorant of that particular unit's position for very long, what with the camera footage showing the position of the tanks, and the reporter reporting the fall of shot relative to their position (in the Army, the guy who does that is called a Forward Observer - so this CNN reporter was effectively acting as a forward observer for Iraqi artillery)....
So, yes, every once in a while, secrets are made public that put people's lives on the line.
Then you have problems with where you live. Where I live, my house cost considerably less than your price for an empty lot, and I'm about 10km from the cbd.
Hmm, a couple years before that time, three or four of us at work were nattering about the second home that one of us had bought for resale.
I said something to the effect that "It's getting so housing prices are so high that people can't afford to buy houses to live in, and that's going to cause problems in the housing market by and by - hard to sell a house if noone can afford to buy it".
One of my coworkers (not the guy who had just bought the house) said "Never happen. housing prices don't go down"
I looked at my coworkers nodding their heads to this, and decided right then that investing in the housing market was an insane idea, and went home and paid off my mortgage the next day.
So while every economist might have said "never happen", at least some normal people could see the writing on the wall farther back than that....
We're still in Iraq.
We're still in Afghanistan.
We're in Libya.
For all that he spent a couple trillion dollars (that we couldn't afford) to "fix the economy", unemployment has hardly budged (shades of FDR, who did the same thing, with the same result).
Guantanamo is still open (admittedly, I never thought he had a chance in hell of actually closing that, since noone wanted the inhabitants of same in their country (including us), and the only other way to close it would have been to kill all the people held there).
Health Care Reform. If Obama had been serious about healthcare reform, all he had to do was lower the age of eligibility of Medicare to zero. Alternatively, he could do the same thing gradually by lowering the age of eligibility by one or two years every year till it was zero. Plus increase Medicare taxes to match the extra load on the system
Instead, he tells the Congress to do the work, provides them no guidelines whatsoever, and signs off on the first thing they come up with. Which was almost guaranteed to be bad, since Congress is far more interested in changing laws to encourage campaign contributions (or threatening to change laws to encourage campaign contributions) than in "fixing" healthcare.
Note that a good marker to how good "Obamacare" is is the number of waivers that have been granted for it already. If it were really a good thing, then there'd not be much need for waivers for every group that campaigned in favour of the bill....
Trick is, a natural gas tank is just a can full of natural gas. and 30 pounds of natural gas is pretty much like any 30 pounds of natural gas.
Batteries, on the other hand, age. As they get older, they hold less energy. So, you take your brand new battery (which you paid a pretty penny for when you bought your new electric car, and which will take your car 200+ miles), and swap it for a five-year-old battery which only holds enough energy for 150 miles. Or 100 miles, if it's a cheap knockoff. Or less, perhaps.
As long as not all batteries are identical in performance, hot-swapping them will only be popular with people who currently have crappy batteries...
Oh, the irony....
Since these particular tornadoes seem to be a side-effect of the disappearance of La Nina, it's unlikely that it'll convince many people other than the True Believers.
Face it, tornadoes happen every year. A lot of them happen every year. You don't read about it so much since most of them do their thing in open country, not over towns, but they're an every year thing.
And seeing a perfectly normal event (a tornado) doesn't usually cause people to go "Ahh!!! The Sky is falling!!! Global Warming is REAL!!! Ahh!!!".
Note, of course, that taxpayer funded research isn't actually the "free market" in action.
Oddly enough, that's not the "free market" either. Limited liability corporations are another creation of government.
And, oddly enough, neither is this. Note that monopolies are one antithesis of the "free market". And they're usually government induced as well.
So, about five wind turbines per km^2 over all of Germany?
Good luck with that.
It should, perhaps, be pointed out that Greenpeace's 200K deaths are not ACTUAL deaths, they are still EXPECTED deaths. One of these days, we might reach 200K deaths as a result of Chernobyl.
Or not.
Of course, what this quote doesn't actually show is that the wargames in question were held east of Midway Island (A US possession), which is rather more than 2500 miles from Japan.
A better comparison might be the Japanese Navy doing wargames on the other side of Midway (about 2500 miles from the USA). Even then, the comparison would be stretching things a bit, since the Japanese didn't actually own anything in the Pacific that was terribly close to Midway.
Note also that a similar comparison might be the British Navy holding wargames in the Atlantic 2500 miles from the USA. Near Ireland, basically....
Well, as to that, if I'm ever in a plane-crashing-disaster-movie sort of situation on take-off or landing, I'm really hoping the pilot isn't up from flipping through the manual at the time....
Last I checked, the furthest planet is only 30 AU out.
Or are you one of those heathens who hold with the sacrilegious notion that Pluto is a planet?
Often??
Actually, since mass ratio to reach LEO is about 10, it's fairly safe to say that fuel is "the bulk of the launch".
Hint: Mass ratio is the number you multiply the empty mass of a launch vehicle (or any other spacecraft) by to get mass with fuel. So typical launch vehicles are more than 90% fuel....
Seriously.
This seems to be the Orion with a new background pic. Four astronauts, 3 week mission.
And where are they going with a three week mission? The moon again?
Can't argue with this. Nonetheless, China's birthrates are well ABOVE "one child per family" birthrates.
You can tell this because China's population is INCREASING, rather than decreasing.
Note that "one child per family" would put birthrate at less than 50% of replacement rate, and result in a population decline of >50% per generation, if it were actually followed.
It largely depends on the age of the reactor core. An older core contains more longer lived isotopes than a younger core.
That said, it doesn't take months to cool it down, even with an old core. A few weeks, tops.
A couple things to note:
most of the people were forced to leave by the tsunami before they could be kicked out as a result of the Fukushima incident.
Two million yen is about what I paid for my house, and my house is nothing special, really. Remember, 500 yen is almost enough to cover a Big Mac and fries.
relative to this, I should note that I spent the last week at the NIH. One of their local newsletter articles included the results of an ongoing survey of possible thyroid cancers among the youth in the immediate area of effect of Chernobyl.
Results? A TOTAL (not increase) of 62 thyroid cancer cases in the relevant population.
While I have never bothered to check on the dosage limits allowed to nuclear workers in Germany, it should be pointed out, for reference, that the levels allowed to nuclear workers over here are lower than the levels generally allowed to civilians.
Citation?
Only deaths even remotely related to Fukushima I've seen mentioned are a few guys who worked there killed by the tsunami (some of them weren't even at work when they were killed), plus one guy who may have had a heart attack (he was only on his second day of work when he collapsed, and his dosage from his first day was lower than what I got last time I had to climb inside a reactor vessel).
Umm, no.
Actually, 100 MW @ 5 cents per kW-hour is 5K dollars per hour. So it pays for itself in 60,000 hours.
Assuming no other costs involved of course.