Chernobyl killed a hundred or so firefighters, in case you were unaware. It was also, in case you were unaware, a deliberate attempt by the government in question to create conditions in the reactor like a meltdown.
You say that like it's supposed to mean something. In case you aren't aware, regulations exist for a reason. Letting every tom dick and Randian harry operate their own nuclear power plants in states without regulation would lead to more Chernobyls, as every corner was cut in the name of increasing quarterly profits.
In case you weren't aware.
we'd still have fewer fatalities as a result of nuclear power than we have on any given day on the highways of America.
The fallout from auto accidents is measured in hours, days, months in the worst case where extensive road repairs are required. Nuclear disasters are measured in hundreds or thousands of years. No comparison whatsoever.
Of course, the anti-nuke hysterics would have you believe that nuclear power is killing millions of people a year, and that building nuclear power plants is essentially identical to throwing tens of thousands of babies into meat-grinders. And since throwing babies into meat grinders is bad, nuclear (which causes babies to be thrown into meat grinders) has just got to be unsafe....
No amount of sad, desperate straw man is going to change the fact that nuclear power is completely and utterly unjustifiable based on cost alone. It's like telling your teenage daughter as she goes off to college that she should stop looking at that used Honda Civic for her first car, and instead buy the $2.5 million Bugatti to drive herself to her classes and work at Starbucks. A Bugatti that has no seat belts or brakes. In case you weren't aware of what a real analogy looks like.
Like most socialists, good job creating a straw man capitalist so you have a villain to push your arguments up against. As a die-hard capitalist, entrepreneur and someone who knows many like myself, there are a few bad eggs but generally most capitalists are dedicated members of society who built their companies to solve a problem, to do so profitability thus the value to society they create becomes sustainable, and spend a lot of their free time and/or resources in charitable actions such as donations or volunteer time.
Your denial, not my straw man. You resign your position and sell your shares when the company you work for announces it's entry into the Libyan slave markets, some other capitalist will buy your shares and the company will find someone else to do you job. Capitalism is a cancer in that it is a naturally self-selecting system that employs and rewards the worst of humanity, as long as there is profit to be made.
And your comments about the Air Force and the FBI are just stupid. You obviously take a very narrow view of the Constitution without understanding the historical context. The Constitution was written with an attempt to be a flexible document, blah blah blah
WHOOOSH. The Constitution wasn't written as a ridged, inflexible document, congratulations on getting the point. Almost. The point being that Randians and other nutjobs only use the "strict constitutionalist" trope against things they don't like, such as Social Security or the Department of Education, not military spending like NORAD or the USAF.
Uh huh. Plenty of Randians are against imperalism and "interventions", so I'm as happy to work with them on that as for ending mass state surveillance or drug prohibition laws. They still don't complain that the USAF is unconstitutional in the same way they complain Social Security or Medicare are supposedly unconstitutional.
Do we get to chose to ignore the lame slippery slope and false equivalency fallacies? There's no connection between a safe and nearly 100% effective vaccine and Tuskegee, you incompetent boob.
So we can force people to vaccinate but we can't force people to have an ID?
The only connection between those dots is the crap between your ears. You not having an ID isn't going to carry the risk of getting everyone who does have ID's around you sick, or possibly even dead.
If you do start with that - then tax sugar, fast food, tabaco, vap, alcohol, gasoline, coal, plastic, and everything else to support wealth of the community.
None of which are going to potentially going to make your neighbor's kids deaf, dumb, or blind after a single exposure. Thus making those comparisons nonsensical and stupid.
t's all very well to rail on anti-vaxer now. Maybe less so when mega-corps start pumping mandatory treatments in future.
No connection between those dots. Measles vaccine is proven, safe, cheap, and prevents hundreds of deaths and thousands of permanent injuries. And of course a highly infectious disease, making it absurd compare it to designer gene therapy or whatever BS analogy you were going for there.
Nose cut. Face Spitten. Congratulations you just became a morality lesson.
Murder, Inc. was market-based. That did not make it conservative or moral any more than a carbon tax is either conservative or moral.
Does nothing to change the fact that a carbon tax is a market-based plan, and thus inherently conservative by nature.
A carbon tax actually isn't market based because it is founded on government rigging of the free market to accomplish a political goal, and because it's based on the scientific fantasy that carbon dioxide as produced by machines is harmful.
Your Randian cult nonsense doesn't change the fact that it's market based. A free market would happily see the world burn if it means continued quarterly profits for shareholders.
Riiiiiight. So which regulations were ended, exactly, that put millions of people back to work after the US joined the war. Car companies were just chomping at the bit to hire thousands of people to build military equipment, but the evil gubbmit was just keepin em down.
Because the "fossil fuel companies" dont employ "working people"
They sure do. But wind and solar already provide more jobs than coal, and that's without the government spending a few hundred billion to update the electrical grid. Anyone laid off from an oil rig or a coal mine can walk right over to the company installing wind turbines or solar panels and find far more positions available.
Because nuclear is an obscenely expensive, risky, and time consuming way to heat water. The sooner plants are decommissioned, the risk goes down along with the amount of waste generated.
MASSIVE amounts of spending. That's Keynes in a nut shell
Uh, no. The point of Keynes spending is to stimulate the economy, something Obama had no interest in doing. He was only out to stimulate stock prices, which have no connection to job creation.
That's Keynes in a nut shell and it never has worked and never will work.
WWII is laughing in your face at how wrong you are.
The history where Democrats are the other party of right wing corporatist war criminals. Who as often as not are farther to the right than the GOP, to such an extent that Trump was able to run to their left on more than a few issues in 2016.
It most definitely is in comparison to the United States. And much of the Chinese pollution western exceptionalists like to whine about is used to produce consumer products for your dumb asses.
Are you a complete idiot, or do 'high taxes' give you a boner or something?
Are you? Income taxes come after the fact. If you are a business owner and think you will make more money by hiring more workers, you will go ahead and do so, regardless of if the income tax rate is 0% or 91%. Because you'll be making more money than you are now. Idiot.
I believe you are arguing with a figment of your imagination and not me.
Uh huh. Except after you say that yet go straight to proving my point:
The existence of the Air Force though is just an extension of the powers to raise an Army.
The USAF is explicitly not a part of the Army since they split in '47. You can say the Marines are constitutional as they are a part of the Navy, but nowhere does the Constitution allow for an air force, nor has an Amendment been passed to allow for it. By the same token, every single spy agency that's not Army or Navy Intelligence is just as "unconstitutional". Yet Randians and strict constitutionalists never ever complain that the CIA/NSA are against the founding document.
Lots of things exist because of government investment in times of war.
The Manhattan Project was to produce nuclear weapons, not nuclear power. Nuclear power, which wouldn't exist without government investment, is a different enchilada.
I want the government out of regulating nuclear power and leaving that to the state governments.
So which state do think would be the first to have a Chernobyl after those pesky rules (regulations) are removed?
making nuclear power the safest and cheapest it can be
Nuclear/safe/cheap. Like good/fast/cheap cars, pick any two.
I believe that capitalists are humans too.
Ones ruled by a profit motive. The officials at Chernobyl were incompetent at their jobs and created a disaster that will last for millennia - but they didn't have a personal financial incentive to make it happen. As opposed to every capitalist everywhere who stands to profit if corners are cut.
I also believe that global warming is too important to leave for the government to solve.
Government is the only entity that can solve it. Again, capitalists would be happy selling dually pickup trucks as passenger vehicles and building F-35 fighters until the world burns.
I want term limits.
Term limits are like trying to treat a ulcer with Drano: the cure is far worse than the disease. You limit a politicans career, and the first thing he's going to look out for is his next career. And what's going to set him up with a better career: serving the interests of his constituents (i.e, you) or monied entities that can compensate him for services rendered?
Zero new taxes needed. Just slash a trillion a year from the imperial budget and you'll have plenty of money for wind and solar. Then there's the fact that the resulting job boom would lead to higher tax receipts - meaning much of a GND would pay for itself over a couple of decades.
Now, all that said - we desperately need a return of the 90% income tax rate we had under Eisenhower, along with Warren's proposed wealth tax. With another zero at the end of it. Not just to pay for stuff, but to prevent the formation of an exempt-from-work aristocracy based on inherited wealth instead of a title.
Eh? When the USSR was industrializing, it's not as if everyone knew of the dangers of climate change and CO2 at the time. It's not like the apologia for American slave owners in the 19th century "it was just a sign of the times" when the rest of the western world had already banned the practice. Coal and hydro were the only games in town until nuclear came around. As for NK keep in mind that 99% of what is heard about the country is western propaganda, or the result of western actions - like sanctions, which strengthen regimes while impoverishing people.
In any case, if the USSR hadn't fallen, it's doubtful that its resource consumption would be 30 times that of developing countries the way it is for the United States. Modern communist countries like Vietnam and Cuba would seem to testify to that.
The proposal doesn't call for either a total ban on fossil fuels nor a ban on air travel. But even if fossil fuel planes were banned, all those out of work mechanics etc could walk right over to the job fair for a high speed rail network. If they couldn't find jobs installing or maintaining wind and solar. Which of course they could.
Funding the military is a constitutionally mandated function of the federal government
The Constitution allows for funding the Army or the Navy - but says nothing about an Air Force, the FBI, or the ATF. But no Randian or "strict constitutionalist" ever complains about that. Ever. It's almost like you're partisan hacks looking for excuses to rag on things you don't like, and aren't arguing on any kind of principle.
I want to see more nuclear power but the problem is that the federal government placed itself in the position that they are the one and only place where anyone in the USA can go to get a license. I want the federal government out of my business.
How do you hold those massively contradictory positions without snapping your spine in six different places? Nuclear energy wouldn't even exist as a concept without massive government investment. It would never have existed in practice without hundreds of billions in taxpayer backing. Backing that extends to dealing with the waste for millennia.
Get the government out of our energy. We would be far better off in the long run for it.
Capitalists would happily see the whole world burn and every last human die if it meant continued quarterly profits. You talk about defense but don't think the government should do anything to defend people from catastrophic climate change.
Who do you expect would believe "the US and it's poodles haven't been deliberately ruining Venezuela's economy and impoverishing it's people" ?
Anyone who isn't engaging in gaslighting and willful dumbfuckery? Sanctions have specifically targeted Venezuela's #1 industry, but have also made it nearly impossible to borrow money or even get diapers. Venezuela has billions in gold abroad that it could use to buy food - but America's lapdogs are refusing. The US has been openly funding opposition parties while whining about supposed Russian interference in its own elections.
But it's also true Chavez, and now Maduro, have stole and rigged many elections since then
Everyone who actually looks at Venezuela's elections, as opposed to parroting US propaganda, says they are free and fair. And if they were rigging elections - then Juan Guaido wouldn't be head of the national assembly, you dumb fuck.
America spends about $80B keeping Middle East using the petrodollar
Fixed. The real reason the US has been supporting a coup in Venezuela is the government trading oil in Euros rather than in dollars. It's also the reason Qaddafi was overthrown, as well as Saddam. Overthrowing Iran and Russia are works in progress.
It would be better to spend $50B on R&D rather than $500B on deployment.
Why. Wind and solar are already more cost effective than coal, and have been for years.
Once the tech is good enough, no government deployment spending is needed, because profit-seeking capitalists will do it for us.
Profit-seeking capitalists would happily see the world burn and everyone die for the sake of quarterly dividends. It's one of the many reasons humanity would have been better off under centuries of communism than ever experimenting with capitalism. No, that is not sarcasm, though the expected capitalist butthurt response will be met with it.
Obama rarely had an annual deficit less than one trillion dollars.
Yeah, that's why you don't want right-wing presidents like Obama, who made the Bush Tax cuts permanent while bailing out the banks. That's what you were going for, right?
So the ten-year 'cost' of Trump's tax cuts is $1TN, so what? That's $100BN/yr, and it stimulated the economy.
No income tax cut as ever created a single job. Ever. If a company thinks they will make more money by hiring more workers, they will do so. If they don't, they don't. Income taxes after the fact are irrelevant to that equation.
Slashdot Mirror
You say that like it's supposed to mean something. In case you aren't aware, regulations exist for a reason. Letting every tom dick and Randian harry operate their own nuclear power plants in states without regulation would lead to more Chernobyls, as every corner was cut in the name of increasing quarterly profits.
In case you weren't aware.
The fallout from auto accidents is measured in hours, days, months in the worst case where extensive road repairs are required. Nuclear disasters are measured in hundreds or thousands of years. No comparison whatsoever.
No amount of sad, desperate straw man is going to change the fact that nuclear power is completely and utterly unjustifiable based on cost alone. It's like telling your teenage daughter as she goes off to college that she should stop looking at that used Honda Civic for her first car, and instead buy the $2.5 million Bugatti to drive herself to her classes and work at Starbucks. A Bugatti that has no seat belts or brakes. In case you weren't aware of what a real analogy looks like.
Your denial, not my straw man. You resign your position and sell your shares when the company you work for announces it's entry into the Libyan slave markets, some other capitalist will buy your shares and the company will find someone else to do you job. Capitalism is a cancer in that it is a naturally self-selecting system that employs and rewards the worst of humanity, as long as there is profit to be made.
WHOOOSH. The Constitution wasn't written as a ridged, inflexible document, congratulations on getting the point. Almost. The point being that Randians and other nutjobs only use the "strict constitutionalist" trope against things they don't like, such as Social Security or the Department of Education, not military spending like NORAD or the USAF.
Uh huh. Plenty of Randians are against imperalism and "interventions", so I'm as happy to work with them on that as for ending mass state surveillance or drug prohibition laws. They still don't complain that the USAF is unconstitutional in the same way they complain Social Security or Medicare are supposedly unconstitutional.
Do we get to chose to ignore the lame slippery slope and false equivalency fallacies? There's no connection between a safe and nearly 100% effective vaccine and Tuskegee, you incompetent boob.
The only connection between those dots is the crap between your ears. You not having an ID isn't going to carry the risk of getting everyone who does have ID's around you sick, or possibly even dead.
None of which are going to potentially going to make your neighbor's kids deaf, dumb, or blind after a single exposure. Thus making those comparisons nonsensical and stupid.
No connection between those dots. Measles vaccine is proven, safe, cheap, and prevents hundreds of deaths and thousands of permanent injuries. And of course a highly infectious disease, making it absurd compare it to designer gene therapy or whatever BS analogy you were going for there.
Your projetion is noted.
Does nothing to change the fact that a carbon tax is a market-based plan, and thus inherently conservative by nature.
Your Randian cult nonsense doesn't change the fact that it's market based. A free market would happily see the world burn if it means continued quarterly profits for shareholders.
Riiiiiight. So which regulations were ended, exactly, that put millions of people back to work after the US joined the war. Car companies were just chomping at the bit to hire thousands of people to build military equipment, but the evil gubbmit was just keepin em down.
They sure do. But wind and solar already provide more jobs than coal, and that's without the government spending a few hundred billion to update the electrical grid. Anyone laid off from an oil rig or a coal mine can walk right over to the company installing wind turbines or solar panels and find far more positions available.
You first.
Because nuclear is an obscenely expensive, risky, and time consuming way to heat water. The sooner plants are decommissioned, the risk goes down along with the amount of waste generated.
Uh, no. The point of Keynes spending is to stimulate the economy, something Obama had no interest in doing. He was only out to stimulate stock prices, which have no connection to job creation.
WWII is laughing in your face at how wrong you are.
The history where Democrats are the other party of right wing corporatist war criminals. Who as often as not are farther to the right than the GOP, to such an extent that Trump was able to run to their left on more than a few issues in 2016.
It most definitely is in comparison to the United States. And much of the Chinese pollution western exceptionalists like to whine about is used to produce consumer products for your dumb asses.
You'll find plenty of other right-wingers on this site. You'll be right at home.
Are you? Income taxes come after the fact. If you are a business owner and think you will make more money by hiring more workers, you will go ahead and do so, regardless of if the income tax rate is 0% or 91%. Because you'll be making more money than you are now. Idiot.
Uh huh. Except after you say that yet go straight to proving my point:
The USAF is explicitly not a part of the Army since they split in '47. You can say the Marines are constitutional as they are a part of the Navy, but nowhere does the Constitution allow for an air force, nor has an Amendment been passed to allow for it. By the same token, every single spy agency that's not Army or Navy Intelligence is just as "unconstitutional". Yet Randians and strict constitutionalists never ever complain that the CIA/NSA are against the founding document.
The Manhattan Project was to produce nuclear weapons, not nuclear power. Nuclear power, which wouldn't exist without government investment, is a different enchilada.
So which state do think would be the first to have a Chernobyl after those pesky rules (regulations) are removed?
Nuclear/safe/cheap. Like good/fast/cheap cars, pick any two.
Ones ruled by a profit motive. The officials at Chernobyl were incompetent at their jobs and created a disaster that will last for millennia - but they didn't have a personal financial incentive to make it happen. As opposed to every capitalist everywhere who stands to profit if corners are cut.
Government is the only entity that can solve it. Again, capitalists would be happy selling dually pickup trucks as passenger vehicles and building F-35 fighters until the world burns.
Term limits are like trying to treat a ulcer with Drano: the cure is far worse than the disease. You limit a politicans career, and the first thing he's going to look out for is his next career. And what's going to set him up with a better career: serving the interests of his constituents (i.e, you) or monied entities that can compensate him for services rendered?
Zero new taxes needed. Just slash a trillion a year from the imperial budget and you'll have plenty of money for wind and solar. Then there's the fact that the resulting job boom would lead to higher tax receipts - meaning much of a GND would pay for itself over a couple of decades.
Now, all that said - we desperately need a return of the 90% income tax rate we had under Eisenhower, along with Warren's proposed wealth tax. With another zero at the end of it. Not just to pay for stuff, but to prevent the formation of an exempt-from-work aristocracy based on inherited wealth instead of a title.
Eh? When the USSR was industrializing, it's not as if everyone knew of the dangers of climate change and CO2 at the time. It's not like the apologia for American slave owners in the 19th century "it was just a sign of the times" when the rest of the western world had already banned the practice. Coal and hydro were the only games in town until nuclear came around. As for NK keep in mind that 99% of what is heard about the country is western propaganda, or the result of western actions - like sanctions, which strengthen regimes while impoverishing people.
In any case, if the USSR hadn't fallen, it's doubtful that its resource consumption would be 30 times that of developing countries the way it is for the United States. Modern communist countries like Vietnam and Cuba would seem to testify to that.
The proposal doesn't call for either a total ban on fossil fuels nor a ban on air travel. But even if fossil fuel planes were banned, all those out of work mechanics etc could walk right over to the job fair for a high speed rail network. If they couldn't find jobs installing or maintaining wind and solar. Which of course they could.
The Constitution allows for funding the Army or the Navy - but says nothing about an Air Force, the FBI, or the ATF. But no Randian or "strict constitutionalist" ever complains about that. Ever. It's almost like you're partisan hacks looking for excuses to rag on things you don't like, and aren't arguing on any kind of principle.
How do you hold those massively contradictory positions without snapping your spine in six different places? Nuclear energy wouldn't even exist as a concept without massive government investment. It would never have existed in practice without hundreds of billions in taxpayer backing. Backing that extends to dealing with the waste for millennia.
Capitalists would happily see the whole world burn and every last human die if it meant continued quarterly profits. You talk about defense but don't think the government should do anything to defend people from catastrophic climate change.
Anyone who isn't engaging in gaslighting and willful dumbfuckery? Sanctions have specifically targeted Venezuela's #1 industry, but have also made it nearly impossible to borrow money or even get diapers. Venezuela has billions in gold abroad that it could use to buy food - but America's lapdogs are refusing. The US has been openly funding opposition parties while whining about supposed Russian interference in its own elections.
Everyone who actually looks at Venezuela's elections, as opposed to parroting US propaganda, says they are free and fair. And if they were rigging elections - then Juan Guaido wouldn't be head of the national assembly, you dumb fuck.
Dumb.
Fuck.
Er.
Eee.
Fixed. The real reason the US has been supporting a coup in Venezuela is the government trading oil in Euros rather than in dollars. It's also the reason Qaddafi was overthrown, as well as Saddam. Overthrowing Iran and Russia are works in progress.
Why. Wind and solar are already more cost effective than coal, and have been for years.
Profit-seeking capitalists would happily see the world burn and everyone die for the sake of quarterly dividends. It's one of the many reasons humanity would have been better off under centuries of communism than ever experimenting with capitalism. No, that is not sarcasm, though the expected capitalist butthurt response will be met with it.
Yeah, that's why you don't want right-wing presidents like Obama, who made the Bush Tax cuts permanent while bailing out the banks. That's what you were going for, right?
No income tax cut as ever created a single job. Ever. If a company thinks they will make more money by hiring more workers, they will do so. If they don't, they don't. Income taxes after the fact are irrelevant to that equation.