I did not see any numbers about the amount of radioactive substances in that footnote, just "among which". Care to provide a link to actual numbers that support the claim in the GP's link?
I don't know who is Alton Brown, but apparently he has a degree in "drama" and another one from a highly regarded "culinary university", and his successful shows are about searching "good" places to eat out along the road and along the beach. And after seeing an episode or two of those "Good Eats" on the youtubes, I can only say that no more than 30% of it is related to actual cooking. But, it has ladies with British accents in it and shopping tips, and that must be giving it some depth that I'm missing. Were I qualified to judge, I'd say it is obviously a first class authority on good eating and cooking.
But I am clearly inferior to judge, though. First, I've not sampled many other TV cooking "entertainment", and second, I can only bake bread and make cheese well, and my skills come from learning the trade the boring way -- by working in several shops in the middle east and southern Europe, and attending several chemistry and biology classes at a local university. Some of my teachers had French names, but their performances were definitely not as American, and their cars were much less fancier. In fact, I was at times insulted by some when I'd do something stupid.
But not the biggest reason -- the biggest reason that the TV is an intellect killer. Spend the evening reading and discussing books, cooking a meal, playing a physical game or doing anything else that needs no purchased electronic device together, and see what difference it makes to the quality of family life.
TV is for the lazy and the stupid. For them, the described device will have only benefits.
"Too cheap to meter" was a statement by Lewis Strauss about nuclear fusion, not nuclear fission. Sadly, we're very far away from a nuclear fission energy plant, first, because it is very hard, much harder than fission, and (probably a distant) second, because such a tech has no immediate military application. So, please, don't confuse the two, and don't attribute "too cheap to meter" to the fission power production. It was never cheap, and it was never possible or viable without huge government support.
Except such times when the nuclear power plants don't operate normally. Even a minor leak at a NPP will exceed by orders of magnitude the 1978 coal plant emissions that are quoted in the linked article. No accident in a coal plant will release any more radioactive matter in the local environment.
The article linked by GP. It says the difference between the radioactive emissions of a nuke plant during normal operation and a coal plant for about a mile downwind of a particular coal plant was about 1:2 in 1978.
I don't claim it is based on "bad science". Given who did it, I won't be very surprised if the research was a bit biased - e.g. in plant selection, etc, but that isn't my argument at all. On the contrary, I'm saying that the research was a GOOD thing, because it was instrumental in making coal plant operations much safer by being one of the reasons filtering was introduced in the 80s.
Mostly, I claim that quoting a 30 year old paper that is based on conditions that don't exist anymore (at least not in the developed countries) that wasn't particularly damning in the first place is not a strong argument in defense of nuclear power generation.
Will you stop regurgitating that ancient crap, please?
This is a quote of a 1978 study, commissioned by the nuclear lobby and performed by a nuclear laboratory, and it only states that a certain unfiltered coal plant may have insignificantly more "radioactive" particles within about a mile downwind from the chimney during times of normal operation. Your generation doesn't remember this, but at the time it was projected that the requirements for filters on the chimneys will bankrupt the coal power generation like, totally, and that we'll be running on nuclear within very short time.
Since then many things happened, one of them being stringent air quality laws all over the developed world.
Wonder why nobody has repeated this study to validate its outcome?
Assuming this is your real profile on google, you just connected your slashdot account, your posting history and opinions to it. That, and your slashdot homepage and your blog (same as your slashdot ID) gives me quite enough to stalk you as I please, especially if I am a company who's in the business of indexing home pages and blogs.
Even better is to use the calibration source that is customarily attached to each device. Mine has one (in a lead case) that provides three levels of emission and a section on calibration in the user manual. I would suppose any usable instrument will have one as well.
You must have missed a lot of news -- the Japanese disaster happened not because "the worst happened", but because of a failure to do a proper design. There was an article on the BBC last week about the fact that practically all German reactors will not withstand a direct hit from an airplane, despite the nuclear industry telling us they would. In Eastern Europe, multiple NPPs have been operating with fuel not intended for their reactors for nearly a decade, apparently resulting in trouble that wasn't publicized very much.
The largest risks associated with nuclear power aren't tsunamis and earthquakes, but corrupt governments and greedy plant operators, who usually come in tandems and configurations that are opaque and hard to control.
Between me and you, rather lame. Avalanche isn't the same thing as water, and your prognostication did not include a list of the other alternative sources that Switzerland could develop. Therefore, not good enough to even use as an investor guideline.
The two papers reported Leuthard backed continuing to use current nuclear plants until the end of their lifespans, not building any new ones, and expanding alternative energy sources such as water power.
Well, I prefer a fixed plan and clear data rate limits (based on business or technological reasons) to a price per amount of data transferred. Making decisions when facing fixed constraints is a lot easier, and I have no extra time to waste on figuring out what is my marginal cost and marginal utility on a byte by byte basis. I much rather pay the provider to manage their resources and to ensure the promised data rate over a longer period of time than the TTL of a network packet.
There are significant savings for the whole economy from transaction costs in this situation -- the phone company needs to optimize a much simpler problem than the mass of individuals facing a variable plan, and in a competitive market it has a very strong incentive to do so.
"Unlimited" means that you pay a fixed price and can use the network up to the limits that are due to the technology and the infrastructure capacity, not that you can swallow up the whole Google Earth database over your mobile connection.
All carriers I have used - in Japan and Europe at least - publish information about the maximum capacity for speed, latency, etc. on their "unlimited" connections. It is then their responsibility to ensure that such capacity is available. Most users of the network understand this, and have no issues with the technology and infrastructure limits; the fixed plan within these limits is good, because you can plan ahead, and don't need to make complex calculations before opening the next email or web page.
There is no "tragedy of the commons" in this situation at all.
Bullshit, they have not "ground them down", they've, just like the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, bought some of them off. The current president of Chechnya was a terrorist himself before aligning himself with Putin and participating in the hunting of his rival families, and he is still involved in terror in Chechnya, only against his private enemies. He's also heavily involved in redistributing Russian federal aid for Chechnya, and has an awesome private automobile park.
The posturing about the Russian secret services is also just a PR, which is a rather poor substitute for effectiveness. Terrorists acts in the Caucasus and the neighboring regions (and that includes Moscow and St. Petersburg, btw) are still happening to this day, and Putin and the FSB have done almost nothing effective to prevent those. The "piss on them in the toilet" (which probably means they'll catch them turrists with their pants down) phrase Putin became famous for happened 5 years before "mission accomplished", in 1999. The most recent deadly terrorist act in Moscow - in January 2011.
There is only one viable way to "combat" terrorism, and it is to remove the problems that cause it. Which are usually problems of resources and education. Unfortunately, this way lowers the profits of the military manufacturers, the influence of the army commanders involved and, most importantly, of the "investors" in the businesses that pillage the said resources. Also, it isn't particularly useful during election times.
That's why we're not seeing much of it, but we see a lot of romanticized assassinations.
You made your position clear, but you failed to justify it. You wrote that communism is a superstition, which implies it is an irrational belief in something. I've shown to you that a) you don't know what communism is and that b) it is "irrational" in the exact same sense that the free market or the Carnot heat engine are "irrational". For your convenience, I've provided you with both the "classical" definition, and its rendering in modern economics terms, and a short analysis.
You disagree emotionally with my argument, but you are not even close to proving it wrong. As for moving your position from "communism is a superstition" to "it is not reasonable", well, you argue as well as you can.
Cheers (and you may have the last word if you wish;) )
Sure. The basic economic principle of a communist government is "to everyone according to their needs, from everyone according to their skills". This principle is roughly equivalent to a Pareto efficient economy (you can look that up), with the additional catches that there is no social inequality that is due to inheritance or to monopoly rents on either supply or demand side, and that every member of the society starts off on a level playing field, as all receive the same chances of education, etc. Theoretically, it is even better than an "efficient" market. So, this is your scientific justification, mmkay?
The assumption of communism that didn't work at all (and why it is an "ideal") is that there is a social mechanism, alternative to the free market, which can solve the free market theoretical failures. Things like, you know, political abuse of democracy (buying votes, lobbying, etc.), monopoly rents, pollution and other externalities, etc. In terms of modern economics, the rough idea was that the society will know the production skills and the approximation of the utility curves in the heads of its members well enough to replace the free market as a means of resource allocation and output distribution. One huge theoretical benefit is there will be no need for a financial system like the one that causes the "business cycle". Imagine a world without banks and Wall street, and rejoice.
The fact that we still don't have a workable system is, actually, sad. If we had that, we'd be busy colonizing the Solar system now. Alas, as Lady Galadriel says, the hearts of men are easily corrupted. In Asimov's "model" of Gaia, this problem is, of course, solved by the existence of a super-conscience in which everyone participates, so everyone's glad. In Heinlein's "The Man on Mars", there is a similar idea about the Martian society, made even spicier when an agent of that society moves to Earth and uses telepathy and sex to create a religion that is simultaneously humanist and communist.
Even in real life, people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are secretly trying to subvert the American dream implement communism by making the richest people pledge their money to a totally non-market, "use-according-to-needs" foundation that puts emphasis on social values (as opposed to individualism). There was one neo-marxist theory of managerial capitalism or somesuch in the late 1970s that predicted something like this will happen eventually.
Any social scheme that requires deception to work, deserves to die stillborn.
Then there is nothing wrong with communism, as it does not require deception to work, it just requires excellent communication and total openness from a society where everyone has excellent education. Kind of like open source development, only applied to everything else.
Slashdot Mirror
I did not see any numbers about the amount of radioactive substances in that footnote, just "among which". Care to provide a link to actual numbers that support the claim in the GP's link?
I don't know who is Alton Brown, but apparently he has a degree in "drama" and another one from a highly regarded "culinary university", and his successful shows are about searching "good" places to eat out along the road and along the beach. And after seeing an episode or two of those "Good Eats" on the youtubes, I can only say that no more than 30% of it is related to actual cooking. But, it has ladies with British accents in it and shopping tips, and that must be giving it some depth that I'm missing. Were I qualified to judge, I'd say it is obviously a first class authority on good eating and cooking.
But I am clearly inferior to judge, though. First, I've not sampled many other TV cooking "entertainment", and second, I can only bake bread and make cheese well, and my skills come from learning the trade the boring way -- by working in several shops in the middle east and southern Europe, and attending several chemistry and biology classes at a local university. Some of my teachers had French names, but their performances were definitely not as American, and their cars were much less fancier. In fact, I was at times insulted by some when I'd do something stupid.
So I lose, like, totally.
Let me know which is this "no shit" tv then. Please.
But not the biggest reason -- the biggest reason that the TV is an intellect killer. Spend the evening reading and discussing books, cooking a meal, playing a physical game or doing anything else that needs no purchased electronic device together, and see what difference it makes to the quality of family life.
TV is for the lazy and the stupid. For them, the described device will have only benefits.
"Too cheap to meter" was a statement by Lewis Strauss about nuclear fusion, not nuclear fission. Sadly, we're very far away from a nuclear fission energy plant, first, because it is very hard, much harder than fission, and (probably a distant) second, because such a tech has no immediate military application. So, please, don't confuse the two, and don't attribute "too cheap to meter" to the fission power production. It was never cheap, and it was never possible or viable without huge government support.
Lateral gene transfer is a well-described and understood phenomenon.
Except such times when the nuclear power plants don't operate normally. Even a minor leak at a NPP will exceed by orders of magnitude the 1978 coal plant emissions that are quoted in the linked article. No accident in a coal plant will release any more radioactive matter in the local environment.
The article linked by GP. It says the difference between the radioactive emissions of a nuke plant during normal operation and a coal plant for about a mile downwind of a particular coal plant was about 1:2 in 1978.
I don't claim it is based on "bad science". Given who did it, I won't be very surprised if the research was a bit biased - e.g. in plant selection, etc, but that isn't my argument at all. On the contrary, I'm saying that the research was a GOOD thing, because it was instrumental in making coal plant operations much safer by being one of the reasons filtering was introduced in the 80s.
Mostly, I claim that quoting a 30 year old paper that is based on conditions that don't exist anymore (at least not in the developed countries) that wasn't particularly damning in the first place is not a strong argument in defense of nuclear power generation.
Will you stop regurgitating that ancient crap, please?
This is a quote of a 1978 study, commissioned by the nuclear lobby and performed by a nuclear laboratory, and it only states that a certain unfiltered coal plant may have insignificantly more "radioactive" particles within about a mile downwind from the chimney during times of normal operation. Your generation doesn't remember this, but at the time it was projected that the requirements for filters on the chimneys will bankrupt the coal power generation like, totally, and that we'll be running on nuclear within very short time.
Since then many things happened, one of them being stringent air quality laws all over the developed world.
Wonder why nobody has repeated this study to validate its outcome?
Assuming this is your real profile on google, you just connected your slashdot account, your posting history and opinions to it. That, and your slashdot homepage and your blog (same as your slashdot ID) gives me quite enough to stalk you as I please, especially if I am a company who's in the business of indexing home pages and blogs.
And so on.
And next, it won't be you talking to the chip, but the chip talking to you.
Welcome to the Matrix, Neo, which pill will you have?
Even better is to use the calibration source that is customarily attached to each device. Mine has one (in a lead case) that provides three levels of emission and a section on calibration in the user manual. I would suppose any usable instrument will have one as well.
That's what American management does to you.
You must have missed a lot of news -- the Japanese disaster happened not because "the worst happened", but because of a failure to do a proper design. There was an article on the BBC last week about the fact that practically all German reactors will not withstand a direct hit from an airplane, despite the nuclear industry telling us they would. In Eastern Europe, multiple NPPs have been operating with fuel not intended for their reactors for nearly a decade, apparently resulting in trouble that wasn't publicized very much.
The largest risks associated with nuclear power aren't tsunamis and earthquakes, but corrupt governments and greedy plant operators, who usually come in tandems and configurations that are opaque and hard to control.
Between me and you, rather lame. Avalanche isn't the same thing as water, and your prognostication did not include a list of the other alternative sources that Switzerland could develop. Therefore, not good enough to even use as an investor guideline.
You could have read the TFA, it wasn't that long:
The two papers reported Leuthard backed continuing to use current nuclear plants until the end of their lifespans, not building any new ones, and expanding alternative energy sources such as water power.
Darwin is "wrong" about evolution in the same way Isaac Newton is "wrong" about physics, you stupid troll.
Well, I prefer a fixed plan and clear data rate limits (based on business or technological reasons) to a price per amount of data transferred. Making decisions when facing fixed constraints is a lot easier, and I have no extra time to waste on figuring out what is my marginal cost and marginal utility on a byte by byte basis. I much rather pay the provider to manage their resources and to ensure the promised data rate over a longer period of time than the TTL of a network packet.
There are significant savings for the whole economy from transaction costs in this situation -- the phone company needs to optimize a much simpler problem than the mass of individuals facing a variable plan, and in a competitive market it has a very strong incentive to do so.
"Unlimited" means that you pay a fixed price and can use the network up to the limits that are due to the technology and the infrastructure capacity, not that you can swallow up the whole Google Earth database over your mobile connection.
All carriers I have used - in Japan and Europe at least - publish information about the maximum capacity for speed, latency, etc. on their "unlimited" connections. It is then their responsibility to ensure that such capacity is available. Most users of the network understand this, and have no issues with the technology and infrastructure limits; the fixed plan within these limits is good, because you can plan ahead, and don't need to make complex calculations before opening the next email or web page.
There is no "tragedy of the commons" in this situation at all.
They blow themselves up in Saudi Arabia because they perceive its government as a puppet of the US. Which is not very far from the truth.
Bullshit, they have not "ground them down", they've, just like the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, bought some of them off. The current president of Chechnya was a terrorist himself before aligning himself with Putin and participating in the hunting of his rival families, and he is still involved in terror in Chechnya, only against his private enemies. He's also heavily involved in redistributing Russian federal aid for Chechnya, and has an awesome private automobile park.
The posturing about the Russian secret services is also just a PR, which is a rather poor substitute for effectiveness. Terrorists acts in the Caucasus and the neighboring regions (and that includes Moscow and St. Petersburg, btw) are still happening to this day, and Putin and the FSB have done almost nothing effective to prevent those. The "piss on them in the toilet" (which probably means they'll catch them turrists with their pants down) phrase Putin became famous for happened 5 years before "mission accomplished", in 1999. The most recent deadly terrorist act in Moscow - in January 2011.
There is only one viable way to "combat" terrorism, and it is to remove the problems that cause it. Which are usually problems of resources and education. Unfortunately, this way lowers the profits of the military manufacturers, the influence of the army commanders involved and, most importantly, of the "investors" in the businesses that pillage the said resources. Also, it isn't particularly useful during election times.
That's why we're not seeing much of it, but we see a lot of romanticized assassinations.
You made your position clear, but you failed to justify it. You wrote that communism is a superstition, which implies it is an irrational belief in something. I've shown to you that a) you don't know what communism is and that b) it is "irrational" in the exact same sense that the free market or the Carnot heat engine are "irrational". For your convenience, I've provided you with both the "classical" definition, and its rendering in modern economics terms, and a short analysis.
You disagree emotionally with my argument, but you are not even close to proving it wrong. As for moving your position from "communism is a superstition" to "it is not reasonable", well, you argue as well as you can.
Cheers (and you may have the last word if you wish ;) )
didn't say you couldn't throw together a scientific justification,
Yep, you did, read your posts above. I am not really interested in a long discussion with parties that move the goalposts.
Cheers,
Sure. The basic economic principle of a communist government is "to everyone according to their needs, from everyone according to their skills". This principle is roughly equivalent to a Pareto efficient economy (you can look that up), with the additional catches that there is no social inequality that is due to inheritance or to monopoly rents on either supply or demand side, and that every member of the society starts off on a level playing field, as all receive the same chances of education, etc. Theoretically, it is even better than an "efficient" market. So, this is your scientific justification, mmkay?
The assumption of communism that didn't work at all (and why it is an "ideal") is that there is a social mechanism, alternative to the free market, which can solve the free market theoretical failures. Things like, you know, political abuse of democracy (buying votes, lobbying, etc.), monopoly rents, pollution and other externalities, etc. In terms of modern economics, the rough idea was that the society will know the production skills and the approximation of the utility curves in the heads of its members well enough to replace the free market as a means of resource allocation and output distribution. One huge theoretical benefit is there will be no need for a financial system like the one that causes the "business cycle". Imagine a world without banks and Wall street, and rejoice.
The fact that we still don't have a workable system is, actually, sad. If we had that, we'd be busy colonizing the Solar system now. Alas, as Lady Galadriel says, the hearts of men are easily corrupted. In Asimov's "model" of Gaia, this problem is, of course, solved by the existence of a super-conscience in which everyone participates, so everyone's glad. In Heinlein's "The Man on Mars", there is a similar idea about the Martian society, made even spicier when an agent of that society moves to Earth and uses telepathy and sex to create a religion that is simultaneously humanist and communist.
Even in real life, people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are secretly trying to subvert the American dream implement communism by making the richest people pledge their money to a totally non-market, "use-according-to-needs" foundation that puts emphasis on social values (as opposed to individualism). There was one neo-marxist theory of managerial capitalism or somesuch in the late 1970s that predicted something like this will happen eventually.
Any social scheme that requires deception to work, deserves to die stillborn.
Then there is nothing wrong with communism, as it does not require deception to work, it just requires excellent communication and total openness from a society where everyone has excellent education. Kind of like open source development, only applied to everything else.