According to my limited understanding of the subject, a Thorium plant would produce a tiny fraction of the nuclear waste that a Uranium plant would. It would also have more intrinsic safety, operate under a lot less pressure, and not require anywhere near as much cooling. That it doesn't involve any fuel suitable for the creation of nuclear weapons is a nice bonus.
It's by no means perfect. I'd rather have us use solar. But if we have to use nuclear, then Thorium seems to lack most of the disadvantages that Uranium plants have.
My underlying point, though, is that we should be looking for a workable compromise, rather than lob irrational arguments around in an attempt to achieve some sort of Pyrrhic victory, which is what replacing nuclear with coal would be for environmentalists: great job getting rid of nuclear, you got something worse in return, and now we're all worse off. We need workable compromises in order to keep moving forward.
I agree. While I'd love to see all nuclear plants gone, fleeing towards even worse technologies is not the right direction. The rising demand for coal scares me more than the existing nuclear plants.
How about we keep the nuclear plants we have for now, except maybe the really old ones that lack modern safety measures. Instead, we start to dismantle the coal plants, and we start building some cleaner power plants. Solar, wind, research thorium (it sounds like nuclear but without pretty much all the disadvantages). Hell, I'm fine with some new uranium plants to get us through until clean energy picks up, just as long as they're really as safe as they can possibly be.
Exactly. It's the centralized control that's the bad idea, just like the concentration of power in corporations in capitalism is bad. It's fine to let individuals and corporations control property, as long as they reimburse the community for everything they take away from the community. That way they won't hoard it and exploit it excessively.
"liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality".
This has been one of favourite quotes ever for quite some time now. Bakunin gets proven more and more correct with every passing decade. We need both in a balanced way, not some ugly patchwork of extremes.
The real problem is that we are too dependent on banks, while allowing them to take unreasonable risks. With our money. In these circumstances, yes, banks do need to be saved. If we don't want government to save failing banks, then we have two options: make sure they never fail, or make sure that if they fail, they don't do a lot of damage.
One possibility is to make bankers personally liable when they lose money that other people entrusted to them, instead of giving them a bonus and a new overpaid job, while the people lose their homes.
I'm not sure if society has really accepted them. Many of the excesses were unknown until recently. Now that we're learning that people are receiving excessive rewards for doing damage to the economy, a lot of people find it unacceptable. The problem is, the economic system is mostly in the hands of the people who profit from it, and not in the hands of the people who find it unacceptable. The last few years showed that it's really not so easy to fix the problem.
Patents don't stifle innovation, they improve it. Without patents, inventors would have to keep their processes secret.
This is silly. If inventors want to make money from their invention, they're going to have to publish it somehow anyway. Most patents are things that are impossible to keep secret anyway. The secret invention is a myth, especially in today's industry.
With patents, you get a monopoly in exchange for publication. And even still, patents don't stop anyone from inventing anything. They just stop people from re-inventing the same thing over and over again.
They also stop people from implementing obvious solutions, and force people to waste time and money on unproductive research just to see if anyone might have patented any of the obvious stuff that you inevitably use.
What patents do most of all, is tax small and new players in the market, and give big old players in the market unreasonable control over that market. It's against the entire notion of a free market.
Are you trying to say that Netherland is somehow not that fertile? That this tiny country is not one of the largest agricultural exporters in the world? And it's not just milk, cheese and potatoes. A large part of it is actually flowers (growing outside, on the fields) and a wide range of other agricultural products. It's true that this summer was a bit too wet (which isn't all that good for potatoes, actually), but mostly we get a pretty nice mix of sun and rain, which is what farmers need. A climate with only non-stop sunshine isn't really all that good (although the presence of rivers will always help).
Its not like the HID lamps fucking blind you enough as it is, we need LASERS! so we can be blinded up to 2 miles away
My thoughts exactly. Biking in the dark and rain, oncoming headlines make it impossible to see anything other than painful light surrounded by a lot of dark. I'd like to see headlamps toned down a bit.
My experience with Microsoft is that I'm still not the customer. Not theirs, anyway. Game companies are their customer, and I'm the game companies' customer. I'm forced to buy a bad product I don't want in order to be able to use the good product I want.
The awesome power of economics will take care of those who don't. Flood plains and polders tend to be very fertile, and rivers tend to be important trade arteries.
However with the population density we have here in the Netherlands, free standing houses are a massive waste of space, and I don't see tower blocks floating any day soon.
I've worked in a floating office. Not a huge office building, but much bigger than a single house.
Most likely, new people would just move in. It's pretty good living here. Most flood zones in the world tend to be both very fertile and trade hubs. Paying for a better house isn't that hard in those conditions.
And if nobody would live in a flood zone, near a volcano, near fault lines, near deserts or infertile land, areas susceptible to tornadoes or other violent storms, coasts (tsunamis), or in any other area that has some sort of problem or disaster risk, I don't think there'd be any place on earth left for us to live. It's much better to pick the place that's most advantageous, and manage the risks. By building floating houses, for example. Floods are much easier to defend against than any of those other disasters.
He may originally intended to release them unredacted, but he clearly changed his mind, quite possibly because a lot of human rights organisations insisted that they needed to be redacted. The plans to redact them have now been ruined by a combination of Assange's (probably justified) paranoia (publishing the encrypted files, but not the encryption key), and The Guardian's ill-conceived publication of the encryption key.
Exactly. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who made a big company out of nothing, there are plenty of CEOs who run big companies successfully, but Steve Jobs is definitely something special. When he took over as CEO of Apple, Apple was struggling, and received money from its big competitor to prevent it from dying completely. Now, a little more than 10 years later, Apple has the biggest market value in the world. He has a very special brand of leadership, where he cares about even tiniest details of his products (like the shade of yellow in a Google logo). You could call that micromanagement, but it works out extremely well for him and Apple.
I think we're going to see a lot of analyses of his leadership style, but I doubt anyone else will manage to copy it.
I'll have you know that my wife is an excellent cook. My wife actually loves all modern (i.e. regular people, vaguely contest-like reality TV-ish) cooking shows, and there's a lot of those on Dutch TV. The only one I can bear is Master Chef. Especially the UK version (the Dutch version sucks, by the way).
What distinguishes Master Chef UK from other shows is that their hosts/chefs/judges are really nice and helpful. The Dutch ones are always real bastards. Top Gear is the exact opposite: it's hosted by a bunch of loud brats. Still entertaining though (but not as much as it used to be).
(Disclosure: I'm a lousy cook and only just got my driver's license. My wife is an excellent cook and driver.)
G+ also doesn't ask for ID when you sign up, but when you're reported as a fake account, they block you and you need to show ID to get unblocked again. But it's okay if it's a badly photoshopped ID.
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According to my limited understanding of the subject, a Thorium plant would produce a tiny fraction of the nuclear waste that a Uranium plant would. It would also have more intrinsic safety, operate under a lot less pressure, and not require anywhere near as much cooling. That it doesn't involve any fuel suitable for the creation of nuclear weapons is a nice bonus.
It's by no means perfect. I'd rather have us use solar. But if we have to use nuclear, then Thorium seems to lack most of the disadvantages that Uranium plants have.
My underlying point, though, is that we should be looking for a workable compromise, rather than lob irrational arguments around in an attempt to achieve some sort of Pyrrhic victory, which is what replacing nuclear with coal would be for environmentalists: great job getting rid of nuclear, you got something worse in return, and now we're all worse off. We need workable compromises in order to keep moving forward.
I agree. While I'd love to see all nuclear plants gone, fleeing towards even worse technologies is not the right direction. The rising demand for coal scares me more than the existing nuclear plants.
How about we keep the nuclear plants we have for now, except maybe the really old ones that lack modern safety measures. Instead, we start to dismantle the coal plants, and we start building some cleaner power plants. Solar, wind, research thorium (it sounds like nuclear but without pretty much all the disadvantages). Hell, I'm fine with some new uranium plants to get us through until clean energy picks up, just as long as they're really as safe as they can possibly be.
You don't happen to be from Innsmouth, do you?
Exactly. It's the centralized control that's the bad idea, just like the concentration of power in corporations in capitalism is bad. It's fine to let individuals and corporations control property, as long as they reimburse the community for everything they take away from the community. That way they won't hoard it and exploit it excessively.
"liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality".
This has been one of favourite quotes ever for quite some time now. Bakunin gets proven more and more correct with every passing decade. We need both in a balanced way, not some ugly patchwork of extremes.
The real problem is that we are too dependent on banks, while allowing them to take unreasonable risks. With our money. In these circumstances, yes, banks do need to be saved. If we don't want government to save failing banks, then we have two options: make sure they never fail, or make sure that if they fail, they don't do a lot of damage.
One possibility is to make bankers personally liable when they lose money that other people entrusted to them, instead of giving them a bonus and a new overpaid job, while the people lose their homes.
It's true for both. Communism assumes people are not greedy, capitalism assumes people are rational and informed. Neither are true.
I'm not sure if society has really accepted them. Many of the excesses were unknown until recently. Now that we're learning that people are receiving excessive rewards for doing damage to the economy, a lot of people find it unacceptable. The problem is, the economic system is mostly in the hands of the people who profit from it, and not in the hands of the people who find it unacceptable. The last few years showed that it's really not so easy to fix the problem.
Patents don't stifle innovation, they improve it. Without patents, inventors would have to keep their processes secret.
This is silly. If inventors want to make money from their invention, they're going to have to publish it somehow anyway. Most patents are things that are impossible to keep secret anyway. The secret invention is a myth, especially in today's industry.
With patents, you get a monopoly in exchange for publication. And even still, patents don't stop anyone from inventing anything. They just stop people from re-inventing the same thing over and over again.
They also stop people from implementing obvious solutions, and force people to waste time and money on unproductive research just to see if anyone might have patented any of the obvious stuff that you inevitably use.
What patents do most of all, is tax small and new players in the market, and give big old players in the market unreasonable control over that market. It's against the entire notion of a free market.
Are you trying to say that Netherland is somehow not that fertile? That this tiny country is not one of the largest agricultural exporters in the world? And it's not just milk, cheese and potatoes. A large part of it is actually flowers (growing outside, on the fields) and a wide range of other agricultural products. It's true that this summer was a bit too wet (which isn't all that good for potatoes, actually), but mostly we get a pretty nice mix of sun and rain, which is what farmers need. A climate with only non-stop sunshine isn't really all that good (although the presence of rivers will always help).
Its not like the HID lamps fucking blind you enough as it is, we need LASERS! so we can be blinded up to 2 miles away
My thoughts exactly. Biking in the dark and rain, oncoming headlines make it impossible to see anything other than painful light surrounded by a lot of dark. I'd like to see headlamps toned down a bit.
My experience with Microsoft is that I'm still not the customer. Not theirs, anyway. Game companies are their customer, and I'm the game companies' customer. I'm forced to buy a bad product I don't want in order to be able to use the good product I want.
The awesome power of economics will take care of those who don't. Flood plains and polders tend to be very fertile, and rivers tend to be important trade arteries.
However with the population density we have here in the Netherlands, free standing houses are a massive waste of space, and I don't see tower blocks floating any day soon.
I've worked in a floating office. Not a huge office building, but much bigger than a single house.
Most likely, new people would just move in. It's pretty good living here. Most flood zones in the world tend to be both very fertile and trade hubs. Paying for a better house isn't that hard in those conditions.
And if nobody would live in a flood zone, near a volcano, near fault lines, near deserts or infertile land, areas susceptible to tornadoes or other violent storms, coasts (tsunamis), or in any other area that has some sort of problem or disaster risk, I don't think there'd be any place on earth left for us to live. It's much better to pick the place that's most advantageous, and manage the risks. By building floating houses, for example. Floods are much easier to defend against than any of those other disasters.
You mean that information prefers not to be anthropomorphized?
He may originally intended to release them unredacted, but he clearly changed his mind, quite possibly because a lot of human rights organisations insisted that they needed to be redacted. The plans to redact them have now been ruined by a combination of Assange's (probably justified) paranoia (publishing the encrypted files, but not the encryption key), and The Guardian's ill-conceived publication of the encryption key.
Perhaps not as much as some others in the Bush administration (not to mention Congress that approved everything), but yes.
If you believe that the (US) patent system is broken, work on changing it.
I would, but the (US) copyright system is broken even worse and it's taking all of my efforts to try and get that one fixed first.
How? The US election system is broken worst of all.
But, to quit your job because you made a mistake would leave the banking industry with only janitors. ...maybe that is a good idea...
Yeah, I wish they'd quit their jobs. Or better yet: got fired. And then tried, sentenced and locked up. In death row.
I would never suggest to anyone to change who they are just to find a date.
Don't change who you are just for a date, but trying to improve yourself is definitely a good idea in general.
As for dates, yes, be yourself, but be your best self. If you turn out to be an asshole, maybe you should fix that first.
Exactly. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who made a big company out of nothing, there are plenty of CEOs who run big companies successfully, but Steve Jobs is definitely something special. When he took over as CEO of Apple, Apple was struggling, and received money from its big competitor to prevent it from dying completely. Now, a little more than 10 years later, Apple has the biggest market value in the world. He has a very special brand of leadership, where he cares about even tiniest details of his products (like the shade of yellow in a Google logo). You could call that micromanagement, but it works out extremely well for him and Apple.
I think we're going to see a lot of analyses of his leadership style, but I doubt anyone else will manage to copy it.
I'll have you know that my wife is an excellent cook. My wife actually loves all modern (i.e. regular people, vaguely contest-like reality TV-ish) cooking shows, and there's a lot of those on Dutch TV. The only one I can bear is Master Chef. Especially the UK version (the Dutch version sucks, by the way).
What distinguishes Master Chef UK from other shows is that their hosts/chefs/judges are really nice and helpful. The Dutch ones are always real bastards. Top Gear is the exact opposite: it's hosted by a bunch of loud brats. Still entertaining though (but not as much as it used to be).
(Disclosure: I'm a lousy cook and only just got my driver's license. My wife is an excellent cook and driver.)
G+ also doesn't ask for ID when you sign up, but when you're reported as a fake account, they block you and you need to show ID to get unblocked again. But it's okay if it's a badly photoshopped ID.
Of course they are. The overlap between my "friends" and "gamers" circle is huge. How would a fellow gamer be less than an acquaintance?