The US has survived... a depression that makes this recession look like good times
Check your numbers... the current depression has much worse numbers across the board than the G.D. Crazy, but true. The only numbers that are better are the numbers that are no longer comparable due to redefinition, such as endless redefinition of the unemployment rate, etc.
"Young People", defined as not living in the nursing home, have this strange idea that America in the 30s was as bad as Germany in the late 20s or late 40s, or Argentina for the past... century it seems. The GD just wasn't that bad, in fact in many ways, it was much better than now. Yes 1/4 of the population was un/under employed, just like now. Yes lots of people lost their homes, just like now. Yes excessive debt destroyed uncountable companies, just like now. Yes millions could not afford food and went to soup kitchens, just like now except we use technology and send them to super-walmart with EBT cards or whatever they're called. Yes we lost a lot of farmland and manufacturing jobs, but not as much as now. Yes fascism and quisling-ism was spreading, just like now. Yes plenty of blaming troubles on immigrants and minorities, just like now. Yes plenty of warmongering to jumpstart the economy, just like now.
For political reasons we can not admit it, but history will look back on this era as the second great depression.
People aren't going to give up their native languages, either.
"The South and California" is much more likely to break off into "North Mexico" than it is into "Tea Party Land" or even "The republican party of quislingville" or whatever.
I don't want the tea party / south to break off. They have fucktarded economic and social principals and will quickly devolve into an violent anarchic slave state that will put Mogadishu to shame. And I don't want to move away from the gulf coast to stay American.
Most likely, considering the long story of fundamentalist thought, they'll consider themselves to be the true "Americans" and the yankees to have broken off from them. And the yankees will probably think the same way about the south.
Maybe what I'm trying to say is it'll probably turn out a heck of a lot more like "North and South Korea" than "China and Taiwan"
( like the feds would ever let that happen anyway )
What if all the middle class moved out, leaving no one left in CA but the illegals and some very rich folks. Basically it would be much like Cancun, a Mexican village with a bunch of resorts on the coast and the vacation homes of a couple rich people. I could see it happening because its not far from it now.
Now we'd probably demand some "foreign" military bases... Also I don't think we'd give up seattle without a fight, need a pacific ocean seaport.
Wait until after the really big city leveling earthquake and we're given the choice of giving it back to.mx in exchange for a bunch of oil, or keeping a majority spanish speaking state out of rebellion with no oil and a trillion dollar price tag to rebuild after the earthquake.
Another possible crisis point would probably be when the aquifer empties in CA, that means no more agriculture.
What happens when Vegas runs out of water will be another interesting crisis point, a lot depends on refugees evacuating east or evacuating west.
Either that, or peak oil declines and narco-state politics finally completely collapse.mx, so we end up taking over.mx as a humanitarian gesture if nothing else, leading to new "US States". Basically a really large Puerto Rico.
One way or another CA and.mx are politically merging "relatively soon" like within my kids lifetime.
Another fan of thehousingbubbleblog and zerohedge? Those two and/. seem to go together a lot. Other than shock sites those are the three that seem to go together the most.
Is it the case that until Android came around, Java, the language, the libraries and the VM collectively known as "Java" was write once run everywhere platform?
I was there. It was never, ever that way. You couldn't even run multiple java apps on the same computer, because one service provider would only run under and support (made up version) 1.1 and another would only run under and support (made up version) 1.2 and they'd crash horrifically on each other's version. So you'd have workers with two PCs on their desk because they need access to both apps. It was just a nightmare.
It was supposed to be multi-platform across anything, but it wasn't even as inter-compatible as windows. Ugh.
Things may have improved in the last decade or so, but in the olden days it was horrific.
Furthermore, the people who... have language issues and so forth, who could be considered most in need of information empowerment, is probably those who will make the least use of this service.
Sure about that? I know some people from.se and you guys are great, but with all due respect the only way I'll get thru the spoken language barrier would be to use this online thing, maybe with some google translate features. I suppose utter functional illiterates will continue to be screwed as they always have been, but literate international travelers would probably love this service.
I would expect to see Intuit (Quicken) or Mint-like companies and services come along to make more sense of it.
They've merged, god help us. What this means is a weekly spam claiming I could lower my current cholesterol level of X using this new prescription drug, and every time I use the app on my phone the thing will be locked out of updating at least one account so I won't get the full story. Basically the old people nightly network news commercials turned into personalized spam, combined with the system whining that they haven't been able to download records from my GP in over six months... I'm not sure that's a good thing. God help the spam box of anyone with a verified genuine legal historical ED prescription.
I have not heard any details about how many of their patients actually USE this service. I would bet no more than half, since many of their patients are geriatric cases - too old to want to bother to learn how to use a computer.
Is it the kind of EMR that is consumer facing, for the unwashed ignorant masses? If so, you're probably right. On the other hand if its the kind of EMR that is doctor facing, for specialists, then the patient's oncologist and/or cardiologist might be burning up the intertubes reading up on them without the patient even knowing. I guess with some services it is not a binary choice, they are the same thing from the same company, just wildly different and complicated login permissions.
I am fairly certain my mom's cardiologist and GP have some kind of shared EMR that she does not particularly care about, but the GP and cardio intensively share data and read each other's notes. Giving her R/O access seems like a nice touch, even if she's not interested in the details.
While you're at it, block people from obtaining their financial and legal records also, since they'll probably not do anything intelligent with those either.
Really, I'm mystified at the hostility. I was named in my grandmother's will, and the lawyer executor sent me all kinds of stuff that I'm sure an idiot would never figure out but a reasonably intelligent guy combined with google, pretty much figured out, and dang it, I should get a copy of the will.
Ditto the financial records, I don't see the hostility toward getting a bank statement.
The interesting thing, is in our corrupt kleptocracy, everyone important already has a copy of my records or can trivially obtain a copy of my records... so why not me?
Lets give this a/. flavor... What if everyone in the world could read the whois record for your domain registration except for yourself, and everyone tried to convince you if you could see your own whois domain registration info, you'd probably just F it all up anyway, so you're better off being seemingly the only human being on the planet without access to it.
I'm just saying that drug penalties are ridiculous in Asia in general. The low incarceration rate may be as much culture as "system"... of course the two are intertwined, but that makes it even harder to look to another culture's system as a model.
Oh I donno, here's a statistical model. Assume They lock up only 1% the drug offenders We lock up. Assume people are the same here and there, and 99% of drug offenders follow Cheech and Chong as their role models, and 1% of drug offenders follow the bad guy in the movie "Scarface" as their role model. Here we lock up 100 people and say our lax laws are still too harsh, because Cheech and Chong are funny and cool. They lock up one dude and leave Cheech and Chong wannabes alone, hopefully they just lock up the bad guy from the movie "Scarface" and they give him a really hard time, well, heck, he deserves it, so of course his penalty will be ridiculous.
I think most of the flack the "asian drug laws" like death to dealers get is not bad legislation, but bad judiciary. The bad guy from Scarface, yeah, he would have earned the death penalty, nothing wrong with that legislation. The problem is when their judges completely F-up and they wanna give Cheech and Chong the death penalty, especially if its just killing them to make a political point. Bad judges are not the fault of bad drug legislation, they're the fault of bad judge appointment legislation, bad laws about judicial corruption, etc.
Or in summary, if you're only gonna punish the worst 1%, well, to a westerner used to giving everyone a slap on the wrist, those 1% are getting an overly harsh sentence, but if their judges are competent (if only...), its weirdly enough not a bad idea.
The 1mSv/year exposure limit is for a "member of the public", meaning that if an average person had more than that amount of exposure, it's abnormal and should be investigated (as it is here), because there might be a dangerous radiation source nearby.
I like your explanation and on/. an EE explanation MIGHT go ever better. It reminds me of FCC mandated RF exposure guidelines. Below this specified level of RF power you simply don't have to care. That doesn't mean that a microwatt over means you've instantly built a flaming open air microwave oven beam weapon of death, which can be built if you use multiple orders of magnitude more power, it just means here's an arbitrary line beneath which you just say "who cares".
I forget the UL labs AC leakage current for residential grade appliances, like if you touch this exposed metal in one hand and ground in the other hand the measured ammeter current must be less than.... I don't remember but it is or was around a couple hundred uA, less than one mA anyway. That doesn't mean that at 2 mA you'll die. In fact even a pretty sick person can survive twenty or thirty mA (remember it as enough to light an old fashioned LED). It just means for regulatory reasons once you get a leakage current below, say, 10 uA you simply don't care about its effects on the human body; its categorically safe. Being a little above categorically safe doesn't mean instant sparking death. Being 3 or 4 orders of magnitude above categorically safe, umm, I'd worry about that. Back in ye olden days I had an old vacuum tube R-392 receiver with bad blocking caps that had a leakage current around 2.0 mA... painful to touch if not properly grounded, but it wasn't going to kill me, although I was well aware it was in no way low enough to be safe enough to be UL listed.
The chart says 40 microsieverts for one chest X-ray. TFA says 1.6 millisieverts in three months. So, the rate is 640 chest X-rays per year, not one. That is much higher than the NRC's public exposure limit of 100 mrem/year (1 millisieverts/year).
Well now you're getting things all confused. First of all a CT (computerized tomography) x-ray takes a zillion xrays at different angles and combines them in a computer with some pretty funky math to make cool 3-d model. Been a long time since a took a nuke physics class (20 years?) but yeah there probably are 100s of xrays taken in one CT scan. A CT scan with only one image taken is kind of a misnomer. Doctors do have to have a reasonable excuse for a CT scan, not just for the heck of it like they do plain x-rays. Are those lumps pneumonia or cancer? Apparently its obvious in a 3-d scan, exactly how I donno. Now a days they use the MRI.
The NRC public exposure limit is NOT 1 mSv per year. I get around 4 times that just by living a natural life. I understand its possible in some weird situations to live at sea level and get as low as 2 mSv/yr and its possible to live in a brick house on a granite mountain with granite countertops in Colorado and get somewhere near 10 mSv/yr. The limit you are quoting is an additional 1 mSv caused by "something". This is a NRC thing but unlike global warming or whatever most nuke physicists worldwide seem to all kind of believe in the 1 mSv number no matter which country they live in (Japan is not under NRC jurisdiction, but I'd be shocked if their standard wasn't about 1 mSv/yr). For x-ray techs this is a serious concern. For a waitress working in a non-smoke free state, this is a serious problem from polonium in tobacco. For a dude going to school, assuming you catch this with dosimeter badges instead of a gamma spectrometer, a mSv here or there is darn near lost in the noise unless you put a lot of work into lifestyle analysis to prove its not coming from lifestyle choices.
I'm thinking 40 years down the road I don't want to die from horrible radiation inflicted disease
If you did, how would you know the disaster caused it? Seriously? Since the typical dose per person is lower than the natural dosage, almost all of the people in Japan who die from "horrible radiation inflicted disease" will have gotten their exposure from smoking, eating bananas, getting doctor xrays, getting dentist xrays, taking transcontinental flights, eating certain seafood, etc etc etc.
Or are Slashdot posters that infatuated with nuclear? Seems like no matter what news comes out on that disaster, we've got apologists crawling out to explain how we don't need to worry about it and any concerns are the ignorant fears of the anti-nuke brainwashed.
A site with endless ranting about software / IT FUD in the early years, then along comes totally non-scientific fear mongering anti-nuclear FUD, what could possibly go wrong?
So should we continue to buy Honda's and Toyota's? I certainly don't want a vehicle that's going to expose me to radiation.
My wife has an '05 toyota. Its not made of cement, and to my best knowledge they have not switched to cement since then.
I have heard innumerable stories about people building canoes and small boats out of concrete, which I suppose you'd want to avoid in this application. Most concrete canoe stories seem to end with an explanation that they sunk it in the lake because it weighed 600 pounds, or to avoid rebar corrosion they avoided rebar, so it promptly cracked and sank. That's the only cement vehicle anecdote I've heard of, until your/. comment.
The gravel used in the cement came from a quarry in the town of Namie, located just miles from the Fukushima plant. While Namie sits inside the government mandated 12-mile “no-go” zone because of radiation concerns, it wasn’t completely closed off until the end of April, meaning the gravel was exposed to radiation spewing from the Fukushima plant during that time.
Mystery solved. The only thing we need to know is if the contractors got the gravel at a "special discounted price".
Another important question is did they analyze the isotopic signature of the accident debris and match it to the isotopic signature of the gravel?
People forget that power plant and the processing plant were radioactive before the accident, theoretically all behind closed doors. I'm Sure This Doesn't Happen In Japan, but in a third world country like China or the USA, I would not be totally surprised if something got dumped in a nearby gravel pit back in '73. Digging it up again after an accident in 2011 proves virtually nothing about the accident. If they dig up Jimmy Hoffa's body in that quarry, that doesn't mean the reactor accident killed Jimmy Hoffa.
I don't think you picked the right country to make a statement about enlightened treatment of prisoners.
I was commenting on their quantity, both numerically and as a population rate, not their quality. Kind of like saying a heck of a lot more Japanese rent than Americans rent is talking about percentages, going on about how much our apartment buildings suck compared to theirs has nothing to do with the numbers.
Honestly, if they only have 1/10th the percentage of prisoners per population that we have, and we optimistically assume they only incarcerate what would be our worst 10% of inmates, they probably deserve whatever they're getting...
I don't think the Japanese have done the concentration camp / death camp thing since the 1940s, but we're proud patriots because we have Guantanamo Bay, so again I'm unimpressed.
Wlet's not forget how much radiation this actually is. It's roughly the equivalent of one chest CT scan per year.
Sure about that? They're getting 1/3 of a mSv per month, so about 4 per year. one chest CT scan is about two dozen or so as a rough rule of thumb. Closer to a CT scan per six years. Since most kids go to primary school about a dozen years, its about the equivalent of two chest CT scans. Not one per year, not two per year, but two. two total. Hmm I went thru two pneumonia x-rays in the last almost 40 years, although those were not CT scans, at any rate the kids are getting about three times the dosage that a middle age non smoker like me is going thru. Not too serious.
Theoretically the girls are getting mammograms every, like, year or something, and each is about 2 mSv, so you do the math. For genetic risk factors my wife gets the girls squashed and zapped every year or so, which is... 2 mSv per year, so apparently from a radiation dose standpoint its about twice as dangerous as... being a girl. Not too serious. Well I mean cancer sucks, but I mean the situation of the kids is not much more dangerous for the girls than being tested for cancer.
Also you get "about" 3 or so mSv per year naturally, from eating bananas, cosmic rays, granite countertops, stuff like that, which is pretty much how the scientists pulled the 1 mSv figure out of some orifice, that an extra 33% probably can't hurt anything? I know the radiation dosage in colorado is much higher than sealevel and the Fukushima kids live at sea level, so you can also describe their increase dosage as a height above sea level. I'm guessing their increased dosage is about the same as moving to Denver. Again, not too serious, although I would not want to live in Denver.
Note this average normal does assumes you don't smoke... the polonium in tobacco means one cancer stick per day equals about one mSv per year, so the 4 mSv increase is equivalent to smoking about four cigs per day, roughly, which is probably about as bad as the second hand smoke from living with a smoking parent. Again, not too serious.
Radiation is fun to learn about because its "secret". Even on/. where people know volts and mV and amps and mA, very few know mSv and rads and rems and such and its pretty easy to learn, and fairly easy to memorize rough comparisons, like a cancer stick per day is a mSv per year, or a CT scan is about two dozen mSv, or a natural dose from mother earth is about a mSv per season depending on your altitude, etc etc.
Why are the building new housing complexes in the Fukishima Death Zone? Build prisons instead.
They haven't developed the prison-industrial growth complex like the Americans have. Japan is a civilized society and does not have enough prisoners.
Before someone heartlessly suggests imprisoning the Fukishima workers, the guys who designed it / built it are retired / dead of old age, and a heck of a lot of the operators downed when they were sent home after the earthquake before the tsunami, and you don't need to build an entire prison to house the small number of fall guys left, and there seems little reason to punish the temps sent in after the disaster.
You won't get the option. Ubuntu are taking a page out of Microsoft's marketing strategy. It will just come in your new TV whether you want it or not.
On all TVs? I think that unlikely. Probably not on the rumored to exist appleTV. Not on the large monitor connected to my mythtv box which I colloquially call my "TV". That last idea might be an interestingly bizarre way to get linux on the desktop, what if all computer monitors came with Ubuntu and you could get some real work done while waiting for windows to boot?
The early screenshots I've seen of its GUI indicate it will be as user-unfriendly and useless as unity.
I look forward to seeing how hard they'll make it to use, in a weird way its kind of entertaining to watch things devolve, watch the world burn. Now, at home to play the Wii I push the "input" button on the side of the TV right above the Wii until I see the Wii screen, easy, fast, convenient, intuitive, and simple. I'm sure they'll think of some agonizing way to have to swipe thru ribbons and menus and unidentifiable icons for 5 minutes to change the input. I'm terrified to even imagine what I'll have to do to adjust the volume... tilt the TV to detect the level with the built in accelerometer?
I'm curious whats actually going on? So, distract the populace with a ridiculous bill, meanwhile push thru and organize... what, the war on Iran, or prepare for the collapse and dissolution of Euroland, or maybe its time for the Argentine economy to collapse again, or... My point is you ram thru an over the top #1 story to overshadow the #2 story, so what is currently the #2 story?
Seems stealing phones just got a lot less risky...
Also setting someone up to take the fall. If they're not complete idiots they'll demand an address to send a check to.
So, let say I want to set up AliasMrAlias and I know his address (This is 100% hypothetical, I have nothing against you, no idea where you live other than probably planet Earth, it just makes a better story). Buy a burner phone, maybe a $20 virgin mobile phone at Target or whatever. Recycle it and provide AliasMrAlias's public available address and contact information. File a police report that someone stole my phone from my jacket while I'm at the bar, sorry I got no description but I do happen to have the serial number, model number, ESN, whatever, basically all the stuff the automated fencing machine collects. AliasMrAlias gets busted for theft / stolen property / whatever / maybe even forced by court to send me the money "he earned" from selling my phone. It was funny to use AliasMrAlias's name in the example, but I suspect they're will be a heck of a lot more examples of ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, ex-spouses, angry coworkers, angry neighbors, angry landlords, practical jokers getting way the heck out of hand, etc.
Once its well known that its non-prosecutable due to this little problem, the real thieves and muggers will then move into that market. I'm not sure if ANY "real civilians" will ever use this service. Kind of like check cashing loanshark places are mostly used to profit off identity theft.
Sorry for the follow up to my post but I hit post too early... the other dodge I'm aware of, is those "new" batteries on ebay actually are shipped in "new" plastic baggies, but guess where the batteries came from?
Never buy a battery (of any sort, not just cellphone) on ebay unless you see and can verify the manufacturing date code and that date isn't like 3 years old. Even if you see that, a bit of white plastic shrink wrap and a computer printed label has an excellent profit return if you sell the "new" battery for $25.
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The US has survived ... a depression that makes this recession look like good times
Check your numbers... the current depression has much worse numbers across the board than the G.D. Crazy, but true. The only numbers that are better are the numbers that are no longer comparable due to redefinition, such as endless redefinition of the unemployment rate, etc.
"Young People", defined as not living in the nursing home, have this strange idea that America in the 30s was as bad as Germany in the late 20s or late 40s, or Argentina for the past... century it seems. The GD just wasn't that bad, in fact in many ways, it was much better than now. Yes 1/4 of the population was un/under employed, just like now. Yes lots of people lost their homes, just like now. Yes excessive debt destroyed uncountable companies, just like now. Yes millions could not afford food and went to soup kitchens, just like now except we use technology and send them to super-walmart with EBT cards or whatever they're called. Yes we lost a lot of farmland and manufacturing jobs, but not as much as now. Yes fascism and quisling-ism was spreading, just like now. Yes plenty of blaming troubles on immigrants and minorities, just like now. Yes plenty of warmongering to jumpstart the economy, just like now.
For political reasons we can not admit it, but history will look back on this era as the second great depression.
People aren't going to give up their native languages, either.
"The South and California" is much more likely to break off into "North Mexico" than it is into "Tea Party Land" or even "The republican party of quislingville" or whatever.
I don't want the tea party / south to break off. They have fucktarded economic and social principals and will quickly devolve into an violent anarchic slave state that will put Mogadishu to shame. And I don't want to move away from the gulf coast to stay American.
Most likely, considering the long story of fundamentalist thought, they'll consider themselves to be the true "Americans" and the yankees to have broken off from them. And the yankees will probably think the same way about the south.
Maybe what I'm trying to say is it'll probably turn out a heck of a lot more like "North and South Korea" than "China and Taiwan"
( like the feds would ever let that happen anyway )
What if all the middle class moved out, leaving no one left in CA but the illegals and some very rich folks. Basically it would be much like Cancun, a Mexican village with a bunch of resorts on the coast and the vacation homes of a couple rich people. I could see it happening because its not far from it now.
Now we'd probably demand some "foreign" military bases... Also I don't think we'd give up seattle without a fight, need a pacific ocean seaport.
Wait until after the really big city leveling earthquake and we're given the choice of giving it back to .mx in exchange for a bunch of oil, or keeping a majority spanish speaking state out of rebellion with no oil and a trillion dollar price tag to rebuild after the earthquake.
Another possible crisis point would probably be when the aquifer empties in CA, that means no more agriculture.
What happens when Vegas runs out of water will be another interesting crisis point, a lot depends on refugees evacuating east or evacuating west.
Either that, or peak oil declines and narco-state politics finally completely collapse .mx, so we end up taking over .mx as a humanitarian gesture if nothing else, leading to new "US States". Basically a really large Puerto Rico.
One way or another CA and .mx are politically merging "relatively soon" like within my kids lifetime.
Another fan of thehousingbubbleblog and zerohedge? Those two and /. seem to go together a lot.
Other than shock sites those are the three that seem to go together the most.
Is it the case that until Android came around, Java, the language, the libraries and the VM collectively known as "Java" was write once run everywhere platform?
I was there. It was never, ever that way. You couldn't even run multiple java apps on the same computer, because one service provider would only run under and support (made up version) 1.1 and another would only run under and support (made up version) 1.2 and they'd crash horrifically on each other's version. So you'd have workers with two PCs on their desk because they need access to both apps. It was just a nightmare.
It was supposed to be multi-platform across anything, but it wasn't even as inter-compatible as windows. Ugh.
Things may have improved in the last decade or so, but in the olden days it was horrific.
Furthermore, the people who ... have language issues and so forth, who could be considered most in need of information empowerment, is probably those who will make the least use of this service.
Sure about that? I know some people from .se and you guys are great, but with all due respect the only way I'll get thru the spoken language barrier would be to use this online thing, maybe with some google translate features. I suppose utter functional illiterates will continue to be screwed as they always have been, but literate international travelers would probably love this service.
I would expect to see Intuit (Quicken) or Mint-like companies and services come along to make more sense of it.
They've merged, god help us. What this means is a weekly spam claiming I could lower my current cholesterol level of X using this new prescription drug, and every time I use the app on my phone the thing will be locked out of updating at least one account so I won't get the full story. Basically the old people nightly network news commercials turned into personalized spam, combined with the system whining that they haven't been able to download records from my GP in over six months... I'm not sure that's a good thing. God help the spam box of anyone with a verified genuine legal historical ED prescription.
I have not heard any details about how many of their patients actually USE this service. I would bet no more than half, since many of their patients are geriatric cases - too old to want to bother to learn how to use a computer.
Is it the kind of EMR that is consumer facing, for the unwashed ignorant masses? If so, you're probably right. On the other hand if its the kind of EMR that is doctor facing, for specialists, then the patient's oncologist and/or cardiologist might be burning up the intertubes reading up on them without the patient even knowing. I guess with some services it is not a binary choice, they are the same thing from the same company, just wildly different and complicated login permissions.
I am fairly certain my mom's cardiologist and GP have some kind of shared EMR that she does not particularly care about, but the GP and cardio intensively share data and read each other's notes. Giving her R/O access seems like a nice touch, even if she's not interested in the details.
While you're at it, block people from obtaining their financial and legal records also, since they'll probably not do anything intelligent with those either.
Really, I'm mystified at the hostility. I was named in my grandmother's will, and the lawyer executor sent me all kinds of stuff that I'm sure an idiot would never figure out but a reasonably intelligent guy combined with google, pretty much figured out, and dang it, I should get a copy of the will.
Ditto the financial records, I don't see the hostility toward getting a bank statement.
The interesting thing, is in our corrupt kleptocracy, everyone important already has a copy of my records or can trivially obtain a copy of my records... so why not me?
Lets give this a /. flavor... What if everyone in the world could read the whois record for your domain registration except for yourself, and everyone tried to convince you if you could see your own whois domain registration info, you'd probably just F it all up anyway, so you're better off being seemingly the only human being on the planet without access to it.
I'm just saying that drug penalties are ridiculous in Asia in general. The low incarceration rate may be as much culture as "system"... of course the two are intertwined, but that makes it even harder to look to another culture's system as a model.
Oh I donno, here's a statistical model. Assume They lock up only 1% the drug offenders We lock up. Assume people are the same here and there, and 99% of drug offenders follow Cheech and Chong as their role models, and 1% of drug offenders follow the bad guy in the movie "Scarface" as their role model. Here we lock up 100 people and say our lax laws are still too harsh, because Cheech and Chong are funny and cool. They lock up one dude and leave Cheech and Chong wannabes alone, hopefully they just lock up the bad guy from the movie "Scarface" and they give him a really hard time, well, heck, he deserves it, so of course his penalty will be ridiculous.
I think most of the flack the "asian drug laws" like death to dealers get is not bad legislation, but bad judiciary. The bad guy from Scarface, yeah, he would have earned the death penalty, nothing wrong with that legislation. The problem is when their judges completely F-up and they wanna give Cheech and Chong the death penalty, especially if its just killing them to make a political point. Bad judges are not the fault of bad drug legislation, they're the fault of bad judge appointment legislation, bad laws about judicial corruption, etc.
Or in summary, if you're only gonna punish the worst 1%, well, to a westerner used to giving everyone a slap on the wrist, those 1% are getting an overly harsh sentence, but if their judges are competent (if only...), its weirdly enough not a bad idea.
The 1mSv/year exposure limit is for a "member of the public", meaning that if an average person had more than that amount of exposure, it's abnormal and should be investigated (as it is here), because there might be a dangerous radiation source nearby.
I like your explanation and on /. an EE explanation MIGHT go ever better. It reminds me of FCC mandated RF exposure guidelines. Below this specified level of RF power you simply don't have to care. That doesn't mean that a microwatt over means you've instantly built a flaming open air microwave oven beam weapon of death, which can be built if you use multiple orders of magnitude more power, it just means here's an arbitrary line beneath which you just say "who cares".
I forget the UL labs AC leakage current for residential grade appliances, like if you touch this exposed metal in one hand and ground in the other hand the measured ammeter current must be less than .... I don't remember but it is or was around a couple hundred uA, less than one mA anyway. That doesn't mean that at 2 mA you'll die. In fact even a pretty sick person can survive twenty or thirty mA (remember it as enough to light an old fashioned LED). It just means for regulatory reasons once you get a leakage current below, say, 10 uA you simply don't care about its effects on the human body; its categorically safe. Being a little above categorically safe doesn't mean instant sparking death. Being 3 or 4 orders of magnitude above categorically safe, umm, I'd worry about that. Back in ye olden days I had an old vacuum tube R-392 receiver with bad blocking caps that had a leakage current around 2.0 mA... painful to touch if not properly grounded, but it wasn't going to kill me, although I was well aware it was in no way low enough to be safe enough to be UL listed.
The chart says 40 microsieverts for one chest X-ray. TFA says 1.6 millisieverts in three months. So, the rate is 640 chest X-rays per year, not one. That is much higher than the NRC's public exposure limit of 100 mrem/year (1 millisieverts/year).
Well now you're getting things all confused. First of all a CT (computerized tomography) x-ray takes a zillion xrays at different angles and combines them in a computer with some pretty funky math to make cool 3-d model. Been a long time since a took a nuke physics class (20 years?) but yeah there probably are 100s of xrays taken in one CT scan. A CT scan with only one image taken is kind of a misnomer. Doctors do have to have a reasonable excuse for a CT scan, not just for the heck of it like they do plain x-rays. Are those lumps pneumonia or cancer? Apparently its obvious in a 3-d scan, exactly how I donno. Now a days they use the MRI.
The NRC public exposure limit is NOT 1 mSv per year. I get around 4 times that just by living a natural life. I understand its possible in some weird situations to live at sea level and get as low as 2 mSv/yr and its possible to live in a brick house on a granite mountain with granite countertops in Colorado and get somewhere near 10 mSv/yr. The limit you are quoting is an additional 1 mSv caused by "something". This is a NRC thing but unlike global warming or whatever most nuke physicists worldwide seem to all kind of believe in the 1 mSv number no matter which country they live in (Japan is not under NRC jurisdiction, but I'd be shocked if their standard wasn't about 1 mSv/yr). For x-ray techs this is a serious concern. For a waitress working in a non-smoke free state, this is a serious problem from polonium in tobacco. For a dude going to school, assuming you catch this with dosimeter badges instead of a gamma spectrometer, a mSv here or there is darn near lost in the noise unless you put a lot of work into lifestyle analysis to prove its not coming from lifestyle choices.
I'm thinking 40 years down the road I don't want to die from horrible radiation inflicted disease
If you did, how would you know the disaster caused it? Seriously?
Since the typical dose per person is lower than the natural dosage, almost all of the people in Japan who die from "horrible radiation inflicted disease" will have gotten their exposure from smoking, eating bananas, getting doctor xrays, getting dentist xrays, taking transcontinental flights, eating certain seafood, etc etc etc.
Or are Slashdot posters that infatuated with nuclear? Seems like no matter what news comes out on that disaster, we've got apologists crawling out to explain how we don't need to worry about it and any concerns are the ignorant fears of the anti-nuke brainwashed.
A site with endless ranting about software / IT FUD in the early years, then along comes totally non-scientific fear mongering anti-nuclear FUD, what could possibly go wrong?
So should we continue to buy Honda's and Toyota's? I certainly don't want a vehicle that's going to expose me to radiation.
My wife has an '05 toyota. Its not made of cement, and to my best knowledge they have not switched to cement since then.
I have heard innumerable stories about people building canoes and small boats out of concrete, which I suppose you'd want to avoid in this application. Most concrete canoe stories seem to end with an explanation that they sunk it in the lake because it weighed 600 pounds, or to avoid rebar corrosion they avoided rebar, so it promptly cracked and sank. That's the only cement vehicle anecdote I've heard of, until your /. comment.
The gravel used in the cement came from a quarry in the town of Namie, located just miles from the Fukushima plant. While Namie sits inside the government mandated 12-mile “no-go” zone because of radiation concerns, it wasn’t completely closed off until the end of April, meaning the gravel was exposed to radiation spewing from the Fukushima plant during that time.
Mystery solved. The only thing we need to know is if the contractors got the gravel at a "special discounted price".
Another important question is did they analyze the isotopic signature of the accident debris and match it to the isotopic signature of the gravel?
People forget that power plant and the processing plant were radioactive before the accident, theoretically all behind closed doors. I'm Sure This Doesn't Happen In Japan, but in a third world country like China or the USA, I would not be totally surprised if something got dumped in a nearby gravel pit back in '73. Digging it up again after an accident in 2011 proves virtually nothing about the accident. If they dig up Jimmy Hoffa's body in that quarry, that doesn't mean the reactor accident killed Jimmy Hoffa.
I don't think you picked the right country to make a statement about enlightened treatment of prisoners.
I was commenting on their quantity, both numerically and as a population rate, not their quality. Kind of like saying a heck of a lot more Japanese rent than Americans rent is talking about percentages, going on about how much our apartment buildings suck compared to theirs has nothing to do with the numbers.
Honestly, if they only have 1/10th the percentage of prisoners per population that we have, and we optimistically assume they only incarcerate what would be our worst 10% of inmates, they probably deserve whatever they're getting...
I don't think the Japanese have done the concentration camp / death camp thing since the 1940s, but we're proud patriots because we have Guantanamo Bay, so again I'm unimpressed.
Wlet's not forget how much radiation this actually is. It's roughly the equivalent of one chest CT scan per year.
Sure about that? They're getting 1/3 of a mSv per month, so about 4 per year. one chest CT scan is about two dozen or so as a rough rule of thumb. Closer to a CT scan per six years. Since most kids go to primary school about a dozen years, its about the equivalent of two chest CT scans. Not one per year, not two per year, but two. two total. Hmm I went thru two pneumonia x-rays in the last almost 40 years, although those were not CT scans, at any rate the kids are getting about three times the dosage that a middle age non smoker like me is going thru. Not too serious.
Theoretically the girls are getting mammograms every, like, year or something, and each is about 2 mSv, so you do the math. For genetic risk factors my wife gets the girls squashed and zapped every year or so, which is ... 2 mSv per year, so apparently from a radiation dose standpoint its about twice as dangerous as ... being a girl. Not too serious. Well I mean cancer sucks, but I mean the situation of the kids is not much more dangerous for the girls than being tested for cancer.
Also you get "about" 3 or so mSv per year naturally, from eating bananas, cosmic rays, granite countertops, stuff like that, which is pretty much how the scientists pulled the 1 mSv figure out of some orifice, that an extra 33% probably can't hurt anything? I know the radiation dosage in colorado is much higher than sealevel and the Fukushima kids live at sea level, so you can also describe their increase dosage as a height above sea level. I'm guessing their increased dosage is about the same as moving to Denver. Again, not too serious, although I would not want to live in Denver.
Note this average normal does assumes you don't smoke... the polonium in tobacco means one cancer stick per day equals about one mSv per year, so the 4 mSv increase is equivalent to smoking about four cigs per day, roughly, which is probably about as bad as the second hand smoke from living with a smoking parent. Again, not too serious.
Radiation is fun to learn about because its "secret". Even on /. where people know volts and mV and amps and mA, very few know mSv and rads and rems and such and its pretty easy to learn, and fairly easy to memorize rough comparisons, like a cancer stick per day is a mSv per year, or a CT scan is about two dozen mSv, or a natural dose from mother earth is about a mSv per season depending on your altitude, etc etc.
Why are the building new housing complexes in the Fukishima Death Zone? Build prisons instead.
They haven't developed the prison-industrial growth complex like the Americans have. Japan is a civilized society and does not have enough prisoners.
Before someone heartlessly suggests imprisoning the Fukishima workers, the guys who designed it / built it are retired / dead of old age, and a heck of a lot of the operators downed when they were sent home after the earthquake before the tsunami, and you don't need to build an entire prison to house the small number of fall guys left, and there seems little reason to punish the temps sent in after the disaster.
You won't get the option. Ubuntu are taking a page out of Microsoft's marketing strategy. It will just come in your new TV whether you want it or not.
On all TVs? I think that unlikely. Probably not on the rumored to exist appleTV. Not on the large monitor connected to my mythtv box which I colloquially call my "TV". That last idea might be an interestingly bizarre way to get linux on the desktop, what if all computer monitors came with Ubuntu and you could get some real work done while waiting for windows to boot?
The early screenshots I've seen of its GUI indicate it will be as user-unfriendly and useless as unity.
I look forward to seeing how hard they'll make it to use, in a weird way its kind of entertaining to watch things devolve, watch the world burn. Now, at home to play the Wii I push the "input" button on the side of the TV right above the Wii until I see the Wii screen, easy, fast, convenient, intuitive, and simple. I'm sure they'll think of some agonizing way to have to swipe thru ribbons and menus and unidentifiable icons for 5 minutes to change the input. I'm terrified to even imagine what I'll have to do to adjust the volume... tilt the TV to detect the level with the built in accelerometer?
I'm curious whats actually going on? So, distract the populace with a ridiculous bill, meanwhile push thru and organize... what, the war on Iran, or prepare for the collapse and dissolution of Euroland, or maybe its time for the Argentine economy to collapse again, or ... My point is you ram thru an over the top #1 story to overshadow the #2 story, so what is currently the #2 story?
Seems stealing phones just got a lot less risky...
Also setting someone up to take the fall. If they're not complete idiots they'll demand an address to send a check to.
So, let say I want to set up AliasMrAlias and I know his address (This is 100% hypothetical, I have nothing against you, no idea where you live other than probably planet Earth, it just makes a better story). Buy a burner phone, maybe a $20 virgin mobile phone at Target or whatever. Recycle it and provide AliasMrAlias's public available address and contact information. File a police report that someone stole my phone from my jacket while I'm at the bar, sorry I got no description but I do happen to have the serial number, model number, ESN, whatever, basically all the stuff the automated fencing machine collects. AliasMrAlias gets busted for theft / stolen property / whatever / maybe even forced by court to send me the money "he earned" from selling my phone. It was funny to use AliasMrAlias's name in the example, but I suspect they're will be a heck of a lot more examples of ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, ex-spouses, angry coworkers, angry neighbors, angry landlords, practical jokers getting way the heck out of hand, etc.
Once its well known that its non-prosecutable due to this little problem, the real thieves and muggers will then move into that market. I'm not sure if ANY "real civilians" will ever use this service. Kind of like check cashing loanshark places are mostly used to profit off identity theft.
And all those phones will go on Ebay marked up 1000%
Probably just their batteries, relabeled and marked as "new".
Sorry for the follow up to my post but I hit post too early... the other dodge I'm aware of, is those "new" batteries on ebay actually are shipped in "new" plastic baggies, but guess where the batteries came from?
Never buy a battery (of any sort, not just cellphone) on ebay unless you see and can verify the manufacturing date code and that date isn't like 3 years old. Even if you see that, a bit of white plastic shrink wrap and a computer printed label has an excellent profit return if you sell the "new" battery for $25.