Considering that medicare has cost us significantly more during the course of the war than the war has, the money we've spent on the war is probably not enough to pay for national health care. We spend about $300,000,000,000 on medicare each year, while the total budget for the iraq war has been less than $500,000,000,000. Then again, it depends what you mean when you say "national health care". Perhaps the program you had in mind is significantly smaller medicare?
What ever happened to calling it "universal health care" or "socialized medicine". Calling it "national health care" almost makes it sound noble and patriotic. If it's a social program, what's so wrong with calling it what it is? Once we have it, it's more likely that we will refer to it with swear words anyway, just as we would any other government program or agency. Maybe we should just call it "bitch care" or "fucking shit" right now and get it over with.
It simply does not make sense to make the claim that our debt would be a problem if the value of the dollar fell. If the value of the dollar falls, the value of debts owed in dollars will fall as well. The real size of the US economy will stay the same (since it is made up of people, factories, and natural resources - not dollars). That means that the relative size of our debt would shrink.
"it will increase our trade deficit and decrease our buying power significantly and thus our overall influence."
Again, this statement contradicts itself. Anything that would decrease our buying power would also decrease the trade deficit. We would buy less foreign made goods, and export more domestic goods.
"We have become a third world country."
No, a third world country lacks basic infrastructure. We have electricity, water, food and transportation, and we would continue to have all these things without international trade (though we would need to drive less. ..). As an informational exercise, can you tell me what country is the world's third largest producer of petroleum?
That's a strange claim. Conventional reactors are built from steel, and they do not "fall apart at because of the accelerated rate of corrosion caused by radioactivity". Molten salt reactors are high temperature, so they must be built from nickel alloys. They use graphite in the core as a moderator.
Molten salt reactors have only ever been used experimentally. Between the aircraft reactor experiment (ARE) and the molten salt reactor experiment (MSRE), they have been shown to be feasible power source for electric generation, though none has ever been used to generate electricity. Since those experiments, a lot of work has been done on molten salts, so there is a bit if an industrial knowledge base. After the initial experiments were carried out, the DOE lost interest in the technology, investing instead in breeder technology. Before a commercial molten salt reactor can be built, a pilot scale reactor must be built and extensively tested, that would take 10 to 20 years, if it were fully funded. Then if it looked like it really was safe and inexpensive, it would take another 5 to 10 years to actually build a commercial power plant based on the technology. This would take an act of god (or congress), and I personally doubt it will happen. The public would never accept a new, experimental reactor to be built. Even if they did, it's funding would not be secure over the span of the project because congress is very fickle. But it is fun to speculate.
Unfortunately, the elements in the salts absorb too many neutrons to allow a molten salt reactor to become critical if it is a fast reactor, that means that a molten salt reactor must be a thermal reactor. If you are using uranium as your fuel source, you need a fast reactor in order to transmute enough U238 to into Pu339 to have a breeder reactor. On the other hand, if you use Thorium as you fuel source, you can have a breeder reactor with thermal(slow) neutrons. The problem with the thorium fuel cycle is that the breeding ratios are so small (around 1.02) so it may not be practical (you would generate only 102 pounds of fissile material for every 100 pounds used, the extra 2 pounds might be lost during reprocessing, or not be generated due to non-optimal operation of the reactor). Liquid metal fast reactors on the uranium fuel cycle achieve a breading ratio round 1.3, so they are known to be feasible, but are reliant on fuel elements and control rods, meaning that the reprocessing cost would be significant.
Reprocessing is expensive mainly due to the labor involved in reprocessing it. Spent fuel must be cut apart and chemically treated in a clean room environment. Removing the tans-uranic elements from spent fuel is not complicated from a chemistry standpoint, but handling spent nuclear fuel is always expensive.
One potential solution is molten salt reactors, which do not use fuel elements but rather use molten uranium salts. Since there are no fuel elements, fuel from the reactor can be chemically treated without a lot of handling. It may even be possible to continuously process the fuel while it's still in the reactor (though this has never been done). Doing this could completely solve the problem of long-term nuclear waste. The only waste produced by such a reactor would be depleted uranium and fission products. Of course, the fission products would need to be safely stored for 300 years before they were safe, but that's a lot better than the trans-uranics that we have to deal with now.
Molten salt reactors also have advantages when it comes to fail safe design. Since they don't have fuel elements or control rods, there is nothing in the reactor core which can break or wear out and cause a melt down to occur. In the case of emergencies, the reactor can be drained into sub-critical containment vessels.
That's doesn't mean that our treasury bills are worthless!
"While we would have nothing but worthless US dollars, 9 trillion dollars of US debt, no comparable industrial infrastructure, and a nation full of marketers, lawyers, and middle management."
This is not at all true. Most of the goods used by US citizens are made here (cars, houses, food!!!). Low cost goods are made in china, but they would be made here as well if the Chinese government didn't fix their currency to the value of the dollar. You seem to have forgotten that the US is the most industrialized nation on earth, much more so than china which is mostly agrarian. US dollars will always have value as long as the biggest spender on earth (The US) uses them. Moreover, if dollars were worthless, the 9 trillion dollars of debt would be as well, so putting those two claims in the same sentence is comical.
"You expect all those office workers to start working in the factories tomorrow"
Well, if they lose their office jobs, I imagine they would.
"Canceling the US debt would hurt us much far more than it would hurt the Chinese."
That's hard to say. It depends on how such an action is viewed by foreign creditors. It's pretty common for warring nations to seize the assets of their enemy (the debt is an asset to them, and our government has control over it). It would be unreasonable to expect us to honor the debt in such a circumstance (we'd pay them money, they'd use it to buy weapons and bomb us).
"I'd rather my tax money go towards throwing parties for NASA employees than towards food stamps for joe-blow white trash McFatty who uses them to buy cigarettes and alcohol on the way to the unemployment line to pick up his (or her) check for being worthless."
Fuck that, I'd rather my money not go at all! No one says the government has to take it from me.
If by "take advantage of" you mean "sell products to". The whole point is that they want to advertise things you'd be interested in, rather than pay to bombard you with adds that you couldn't care less about. If you're going to be staring at a wal-mart add anyway, it might as well be for something you'd actually consider buying!
Haven't you ever heard of a security label? What's to stop just some random person from taking something off the shelf and trying to return it (WalMart has an extremely liberal return policy, you don't need a receipt or any packaging to return an item for store credit)? That's what the greeter at the front door is there for.
What do you get when you mix politics, copious amounts of public money, and stifling bureaucracy? Incompetence on a grand scale, of course! The only people who can succeed in government agencies are spineless people pleasing buck-passers who avoid making decisions at all costs and are quick to shift the blame whenever they do get into trouble.
Probably the only reason they staged this briefing was so whoever was running it wouldn't have to worry about saying something wrong and making an ass of himself/getting fired. Maybe the real problem is that we, the american public, are so intolerant of even the most basic, insignificant mistakes, that the only people who even get to public office are the ones who don't make decisions, never speak frankly and honestly, and are generally inhuman.
Wait a minute. The purpose of science is to discover objective truth. For the most part, this is accomplished disproving existing theories, but the idea is that this will eventually lead to the real truth, or at least lead us much closer to it. Whether or not objective truth is ever discovered, it is the goal that scientists are working toward. Moreover, many scientists believe in the objective truth of the hypothesis they are testing, otherwise they would not be investigating it. If there is no such thing as objective truth, then the efforts of many scientists are totally misguided.
"the mishandling of lead, solvents, beryllium, and other substances used in the manufacture of electronic devices is not a serious environmental problem which has led to death, disease, and birth defects in this country and others,"
Okay, most microelectronics facilities are zero discharge, meaning that they do not discharge industrial wastewater. They generate almost no air pollution. Even if they dumped everything, they make small components, so the environmental impact would be insignificant compared to, say, a textile mill or a concrete batch plant. My claim was not that there is no environmental impact, but you need to face the reality that you do more environmental damage when you flush your toilet than when you buy an iPhone.
"genetically modifying crops so that they can survive massive doses of herbicides (such as Roundup) which eventually run off into our waterways cannot possibly cause serious environmental problems in downstream ecosystems, and"
Well, normally, they use selective herbicides which tend to be persistent and toxic to humans. Roundup is not toxic to humans, and is not persistent in the environment (it is also inexpensive). So, yeah, round-up ready is good for the environment. Plus, use of round-up ready means that less land has to be cultivated to produce the same amount of food, so it reduces the environmental footprint over organic farming. P.S. the major source of sown stream pollution in conventional farming is fertilizer, not herbicides or pesticides. But GMOs can help with nitrogen fixing as well, and a lot or research is being done in that area.
"Thousands of tons of high-level nuclear waste from reactors which will be deadly for longer than our lifetimes do not in fact exist."
High level nuclear waste is comprised of trans-uranics that actually produce a low level of radiation, but are long lived. These materials are useful as nuclear fuel, and should be reused, but green-peace does not advocate fuel reprocessing. No matter what you say, thousands of tons of radioactive waste buried in the earth is better than billions of tons of pollution vented directly in the atmosphere. Less environmental damage is better, I don't know why that is so hard to understand.
You don't have to be a tin foil hatter to see that green peace does not promote polices that will lead to an improved human condition. For one thing, they routinely target the electronics industry, probably the cleanest industry around. Not only do electronics make our lives better by organizing information and promoting communication, but they make industry itself more efficient. But it is targeted by green peace because that's where the money is, and it's easy to promote fear when new technology is involved.
Another good example is GMOs. Green-peace is always decrying pesticides, but then the come out against GMOs. WTF? The whole point of GMOs is that you won't have to use pesticides anymore!!!! If green peace cares about the environment, they should be all for GMOs, right? Please don't reply to this post with some nonsense about round-up ready corn, it's still better than the alternative.
Probably the best example is nuclear power. Nuclear power does not emit pollution into the environment, period. That's good, right? But no, green peace is completely against it. What the hell is going on?!?
This supposedly environmentalist organization is always coming out against new technologies that will improve environmental quality. I'll tell you what, either they don't know anything about the environment, or they are not an environmentalist organization. I'm not going to speculate what their motives and intentions are, but either way they're a menace to society.
"It's sad that the most basic of methods to protect the people is so vulnerable."
Basically, it seems that the only "hacking" he did was making it seem as though he called from a different location that he was actually calling from. Most of the work he did was probably sounding convincing on the telephone with the 911 operator. I guess my problem is that I don't see how the system could be made more secure. It's always going to be (relatively) trivial to give misinformation about the location of a caller, and you'll always be able to lie to a 911 operator. The swat team was sent in to help a person who they believed had been shot, so they believed it was an issue of mortal danger where inaction or delay could lead to death. Moreover they believed that armed assailants were still at the home.
What response do you feel would have been appropriate? Or how do you feel that the system could have been more secure? It just doesn't seem possible that this situation could've been handled better.
I'd like to point out that the headline is a little overstated. Countries are considering seeking damages in the WTO, that's far from saying that the US faces a fine.
Gambling in the US is a tricky subject, and online gambling has been banned because states felt that it was limiting their ability to regulate and ban gambling. I think it's really disingenuous to claim that this law is intended as some kind of barrier to trade. I don't know how this would hold up if it actually went to the WTO (it's a murky issue) but chances are that it won't come to that anyway. There are always better alternatives to trade sanctions, trade sanctions are bad for everyone, so no one wants to see that happen.
The sensors for the F22, for example, are made by BAE Systems E&IS, and Northrop Grumman in the united states. The US military has a vested interest in insuring that key components of military hardware are made domestically. That way they can ensure the technology will not fall into enemy hands, and ensure that war abroad will not affect supply of military hardware.
There are two kinds of liquid metal cooled fast reactors: Loop type and Pool type. These reactors both use two sodium coolant loops, to keep the radioactive core coolant separate from the reactor seam. This greatly reduces the risk of a release of radioactive material.
In a loop type reactor, the core coolant is circulated through a loop which leaves the primary containment vessel. This makes it more susceptible to an environmental release of radiation than a pool type reactor, where the exchange between the first and second loops takes place within the primary containment vessel. MONJU was a loop type reactor.
Sodium does not corrode steel containment vessels, so in some ways a sodium reactor is safer than a conventional one. On the other hand, liquid sodium reacts violently with with the moisture in the atmosphere. In a pool type reactor, this would not lead to a release of radioactive material, and would only result in reactor down time.
EBR2, the IFR test reactor was built and operated. I'm not sure if you meant to imply that it wasn't. Of course, a commercial - scale power generating IFR has not been built, so it's still a highly experimental technology, but the test reactor was built and tested.
"Today, they simply ask the Fed to print more money for them to borrow."
The FED only lends money to banks, who lend it out for loans to private industry. Believe it or not, the majority of the domestic national debt it owed to . . . the U.S. government. Social security has been collecting a surplus of money since its inception, and the government has been spending that, and issuing bonds to repay what they took from the program at a later date (presumably they will pay for it by raising the federal income tax). The rest of the national debt is owed to private investors who purchased bonds from the government at a fixed rate of return, much of this money is owed to foreign entities. To finance a deficit, the government issues more bonds, which it must repay later with interest.
The FED isn't some huge conspiracy, a bunch of banks got together and tried to find a way to end the volatility that the money market was continually facing. The primary goal of the FED is controlling inflation. People always say that inflation is out of control, I don't know what country they live in. We have very low, but always positive inflation. Most economists agree that this is the best situation. Anything else you can think of (including a commodity standard) would be much worse. It would be more volatile, and it would be hard to control inflation.
That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. The long term cost of a maglev is higher, as they require more power to operate. They're not environmentally friendly, since they use more power, and they require more infrastructure be build in the first place. And that extra speed costs you as well. If you'd like fast service despite the added cost, I'd like to point you to the eurostar, which travels at 200 mph, but is a conventional electric train. There is no good reason to use maglev over conventional tech (except for bragging rights).
Re:If I could do it all over again...
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"I had been under the impression that engineering degrees were generally for people who wanted to make money (in a normal-ish job) after graduation, while sciences were for people who either wanted to be, or accepted the risk of being in academia for life. Is that not the case?"
I think that anyone who wants an engineering degree for the money will be disappointed. I have a degree in chemical engineering, and I make $55,000 (that is with 10 months of experience). That sounds like a lot for being just out of school, but given the extra effort of obtaining the degree, and the amount of work that is expected from me at my job, I don't think it's a better deal than a liberal arts degree would've been. I think that the value of any degree is what you do with it. If you work to gain valuable experience, advocate yourself, and work well with others, you can make a 6 figure income with any degree.
I am in the field because I am passionate about making peoples lives better, and I feel like engineering accomplishes that. I don't want to work forever in academia, because I feel like all the mindless bureaucracy and politics of the university makes enriching the lives of others nearly impossible. Of course, if I did want to work forever in academics, I could still do that with an engineering degree.
Re:If I could do it all over again...
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It sounds like you don't have a chemistry or nuclear physics degree. College degrees are a way to get in the door at jobs that require one. Basically it's the way employers protect against hiring slackers (since fewer college grads are slackers, though some are). Hard science degrees are not worth an appreciable amount more than english degrees, though they are harder to get. Passion is the only reason you should get a hard degree (like science or engineering), because you're not going to be making a lot more money out of college*.
* your mileage may vary, some technical degrees are worth more than liberal arts degrees (particularly EE, ME and specialty engineering degrees like computer engineering), these degrees are probably not worth the extra effort if you are interested in money alone, but are good idea for someone with passion.
You're right in your assertion that lowering the discount rate devalues currency and savings, but I don't think that really hurts people who practice fiscal prudence. Most people have short term savings in the bank, but their retirement plans and their children's college funds are invested in stocks and bonds. And equity in you house is generally unaffected as well. So for the most part, lowering the rate will have positive effect on everyone concerned.
It's probably best that the money supply is not totally a "free market". The US economy could not be nearly so large and complex if investors had to contend with unstable money supply and economic conditions. Investors with a lot riding on the market are just too easily spooked by market re-valuations, and the fed basically provides them a kind of insurance against unpredictable market behavior (though not so much that they feel free to invest recklessly without threat of negative repercussions).
I'd say that any criticism of the FED should be taken with an extra large size grain of salt. This is one branch of the government that has done an excellent job of making everyone's lives better.
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Considering that medicare has cost us significantly more during the course of the war than the war has, the money we've spent on the war is probably not enough to pay for national health care. We spend about $300,000,000,000 on medicare each year, while the total budget for the iraq war has been less than $500,000,000,000. Then again, it depends what you mean when you say "national health care". Perhaps the program you had in mind is significantly smaller medicare?
What ever happened to calling it "universal health care" or "socialized medicine". Calling it "national health care" almost makes it sound noble and patriotic. If it's a social program, what's so wrong with calling it what it is? Once we have it, it's more likely that we will refer to it with swear words anyway, just as we would any other government program or agency. Maybe we should just call it "bitch care" or "fucking shit" right now and get it over with.
Fun times will be had by all.
It simply does not make sense to make the claim that our debt would be a problem if the value of the dollar fell. If the value of the dollar falls, the value of debts owed in dollars will fall as well. The real size of the US economy will stay the same (since it is made up of people, factories, and natural resources - not dollars). That means that the relative size of our debt would shrink.
.). As an informational exercise, can you tell me what country is the world's third largest producer of petroleum?
"it will increase our trade deficit and decrease our buying power significantly and thus our overall influence."
Again, this statement contradicts itself. Anything that would decrease our buying power would also decrease the trade deficit. We would buy less foreign made goods, and export more domestic goods.
"We have become a third world country."
No, a third world country lacks basic infrastructure. We have electricity, water, food and transportation, and we would continue to have all these things without international trade (though we would need to drive less. .
That's a strange claim. Conventional reactors are built from steel, and they do not "fall apart at because of the accelerated rate of corrosion caused by radioactivity". Molten salt reactors are high temperature, so they must be built from nickel alloys. They use graphite in the core as a moderator.
Molten salt reactors have only ever been used experimentally. Between the aircraft reactor experiment (ARE) and the molten salt reactor experiment (MSRE), they have been shown to be feasible power source for electric generation, though none has ever been used to generate electricity. Since those experiments, a lot of work has been done on molten salts, so there is a bit if an industrial knowledge base. After the initial experiments were carried out, the DOE lost interest in the technology, investing instead in breeder technology. Before a commercial molten salt reactor can be built, a pilot scale reactor must be built and extensively tested, that would take 10 to 20 years, if it were fully funded. Then if it looked like it really was safe and inexpensive, it would take another 5 to 10 years to actually build a commercial power plant based on the technology. This would take an act of god (or congress), and I personally doubt it will happen. The public would never accept a new, experimental reactor to be built. Even if they did, it's funding would not be secure over the span of the project because congress is very fickle. But it is fun to speculate.
Unfortunately, the elements in the salts absorb too many neutrons to allow a molten salt reactor to become critical if it is a fast reactor, that means that a molten salt reactor must be a thermal reactor. If you are using uranium as your fuel source, you need a fast reactor in order to transmute enough U238 to into Pu339 to have a breeder reactor. On the other hand, if you use Thorium as you fuel source, you can have a breeder reactor with thermal(slow) neutrons. The problem with the thorium fuel cycle is that the breeding ratios are so small (around 1.02) so it may not be practical (you would generate only 102 pounds of fissile material for every 100 pounds used, the extra 2 pounds might be lost during reprocessing, or not be generated due to non-optimal operation of the reactor). Liquid metal fast reactors on the uranium fuel cycle achieve a breading ratio round 1.3, so they are known to be feasible, but are reliant on fuel elements and control rods, meaning that the reprocessing cost would be significant.
Reprocessing is expensive mainly due to the labor involved in reprocessing it. Spent fuel must be cut apart and chemically treated in a clean room environment. Removing the tans-uranic elements from spent fuel is not complicated from a chemistry standpoint, but handling spent nuclear fuel is always expensive.
One potential solution is molten salt reactors, which do not use fuel elements but rather use molten uranium salts. Since there are no fuel elements, fuel from the reactor can be chemically treated without a lot of handling. It may even be possible to continuously process the fuel while it's still in the reactor (though this has never been done). Doing this could completely solve the problem of long-term nuclear waste. The only waste produced by such a reactor would be depleted uranium and fission products. Of course, the fission products would need to be safely stored for 300 years before they were safe, but that's a lot better than the trans-uranics that we have to deal with now.
Molten salt reactors also have advantages when it comes to fail safe design. Since they don't have fuel elements or control rods, there is nothing in the reactor core which can break or wear out and cause a melt down to occur. In the case of emergencies, the reactor can be drained into sub-critical containment vessels.
"China has plenty of Euro reserves"
That's doesn't mean that our treasury bills are worthless!
"While we would have nothing but worthless US dollars, 9 trillion dollars of US debt, no comparable industrial infrastructure, and a nation full of marketers, lawyers, and middle management."
This is not at all true. Most of the goods used by US citizens are made here (cars, houses, food!!!). Low cost goods are made in china, but they would be made here as well if the Chinese government didn't fix their currency to the value of the dollar. You seem to have forgotten that the US is the most industrialized nation on earth, much more so than china which is mostly agrarian. US dollars will always have value as long as the biggest spender on earth (The US) uses them. Moreover, if dollars were worthless, the 9 trillion dollars of debt would be as well, so putting those two claims in the same sentence is comical.
"You expect all those office workers to start working in the factories tomorrow"
Well, if they lose their office jobs, I imagine they would.
"Canceling the US debt would hurt us much far more than it would hurt the Chinese."
That's hard to say. It depends on how such an action is viewed by foreign creditors. It's pretty common for warring nations to seize the assets of their enemy (the debt is an asset to them, and our government has control over it). It would be unreasonable to expect us to honor the debt in such a circumstance (we'd pay them money, they'd use it to buy weapons and bomb us).
You do know that's a reason for them not to attack us, right? I mean, it's not like we'd honor their treasury bonds if they declared war on us.
"I'd rather my tax money go towards throwing parties for NASA employees than towards food stamps for joe-blow white trash McFatty who uses them to buy cigarettes and alcohol on the way to the unemployment line to pick up his (or her) check for being worthless."
Fuck that, I'd rather my money not go at all! No one says the government has to take it from me.
If by "take advantage of" you mean "sell products to". The whole point is that they want to advertise things you'd be interested in, rather than pay to bombard you with adds that you couldn't care less about. If you're going to be staring at a wal-mart add anyway, it might as well be for something you'd actually consider buying!
Haven't you ever heard of a security label? What's to stop just some random person from taking something off the shelf and trying to return it (WalMart has an extremely liberal return policy, you don't need a receipt or any packaging to return an item for store credit)? That's what the greeter at the front door is there for.
What do you get when you mix politics, copious amounts of public money, and stifling bureaucracy? Incompetence on a grand scale, of course! The only people who can succeed in government agencies are spineless people pleasing buck-passers who avoid making decisions at all costs and are quick to shift the blame whenever they do get into trouble.
Probably the only reason they staged this briefing was so whoever was running it wouldn't have to worry about saying something wrong and making an ass of himself/getting fired. Maybe the real problem is that we, the american public, are so intolerant of even the most basic, insignificant mistakes, that the only people who even get to public office are the ones who don't make decisions, never speak frankly and honestly, and are generally inhuman.
Wait a minute. The purpose of science is to discover objective truth. For the most part, this is accomplished disproving existing theories, but the idea is that this will eventually lead to the real truth, or at least lead us much closer to it. Whether or not objective truth is ever discovered, it is the goal that scientists are working toward. Moreover, many scientists believe in the objective truth of the hypothesis they are testing, otherwise they would not be investigating it. If there is no such thing as objective truth, then the efforts of many scientists are totally misguided.
"the mishandling of lead, solvents, beryllium, and other substances used in the manufacture of electronic devices is not a serious environmental problem which has led to death, disease, and birth defects in this country and others,"
Okay, most microelectronics facilities are zero discharge, meaning that they do not discharge industrial wastewater. They generate almost no air pollution. Even if they dumped everything, they make small components, so the environmental impact would be insignificant compared to, say, a textile mill or a concrete batch plant. My claim was not that there is no environmental impact, but you need to face the reality that you do more environmental damage when you flush your toilet than when you buy an iPhone.
"genetically modifying crops so that they can survive massive doses of herbicides (such as Roundup) which eventually run off into our waterways cannot possibly cause serious environmental problems in downstream ecosystems, and"
Well, normally, they use selective herbicides which tend to be persistent and toxic to humans. Roundup is not toxic to humans, and is not persistent in the environment (it is also inexpensive). So, yeah, round-up ready is good for the environment. Plus, use of round-up ready means that less land has to be cultivated to produce the same amount of food, so it reduces the environmental footprint over organic farming. P.S. the major source of sown stream pollution in conventional farming is fertilizer, not herbicides or pesticides. But GMOs can help with nitrogen fixing as well, and a lot or research is being done in that area.
"Thousands of tons of high-level nuclear waste from reactors which will be deadly for longer than our lifetimes do not in fact exist."
High level nuclear waste is comprised of trans-uranics that actually produce a low level of radiation, but are long lived. These materials are useful as nuclear fuel, and should be reused, but green-peace does not advocate fuel reprocessing. No matter what you say, thousands of tons of radioactive waste buried in the earth is better than billions of tons of pollution vented directly in the atmosphere. Less environmental damage is better, I don't know why that is so hard to understand.
You don't have to be a tin foil hatter to see that green peace does not promote polices that will lead to an improved human condition. For one thing, they routinely target the electronics industry, probably the cleanest industry around. Not only do electronics make our lives better by organizing information and promoting communication, but they make industry itself more efficient. But it is targeted by green peace because that's where the money is, and it's easy to promote fear when new technology is involved.
Another good example is GMOs. Green-peace is always decrying pesticides, but then the come out against GMOs. WTF? The whole point of GMOs is that you won't have to use pesticides anymore!!!! If green peace cares about the environment, they should be all for GMOs, right? Please don't reply to this post with some nonsense about round-up ready corn, it's still better than the alternative.
Probably the best example is nuclear power. Nuclear power does not emit pollution into the environment, period. That's good, right? But no, green peace is completely against it. What the hell is going on?!?
This supposedly environmentalist organization is always coming out against new technologies that will improve environmental quality. I'll tell you what, either they don't know anything about the environment, or they are not an environmentalist organization. I'm not going to speculate what their motives and intentions are, but either way they're a menace to society.
"It's sad that the most basic of methods to protect the people is so vulnerable."
Basically, it seems that the only "hacking" he did was making it seem as though he called from a different location that he was actually calling from. Most of the work he did was probably sounding convincing on the telephone with the 911 operator. I guess my problem is that I don't see how the system could be made more secure. It's always going to be (relatively) trivial to give misinformation about the location of a caller, and you'll always be able to lie to a 911 operator. The swat team was sent in to help a person who they believed had been shot, so they believed it was an issue of mortal danger where inaction or delay could lead to death. Moreover they believed that armed assailants were still at the home.
What response do you feel would have been appropriate? Or how do you feel that the system could have been more secure? It just doesn't seem possible that this situation could've been handled better.
I'd like to point out that the headline is a little overstated. Countries are considering seeking damages in the WTO, that's far from saying that the US faces a fine.
Gambling in the US is a tricky subject, and online gambling has been banned because states felt that it was limiting their ability to regulate and ban gambling. I think it's really disingenuous to claim that this law is intended as some kind of barrier to trade. I don't know how this would hold up if it actually went to the WTO (it's a murky issue) but chances are that it won't come to that anyway. There are always better alternatives to trade sanctions, trade sanctions are bad for everyone, so no one wants to see that happen.
The sensors for the F22, for example, are made by BAE Systems E&IS, and Northrop Grumman in the united states. The US military has a vested interest in insuring that key components of military hardware are made domestically. That way they can ensure the technology will not fall into enemy hands, and ensure that war abroad will not affect supply of military hardware.
There are two kinds of liquid metal cooled fast reactors: Loop type and Pool type. These reactors both use two sodium coolant loops, to keep the radioactive core coolant separate from the reactor seam. This greatly reduces the risk of a release of radioactive material.
In a loop type reactor, the core coolant is circulated through a loop which leaves the primary containment vessel. This makes it more susceptible to an environmental release of radiation than a pool type reactor, where the exchange between the first and second loops takes place within the primary containment vessel. MONJU was a loop type reactor.
Sodium does not corrode steel containment vessels, so in some ways a sodium reactor is safer than a conventional one. On the other hand, liquid sodium reacts violently with with the moisture in the atmosphere. In a pool type reactor, this would not lead to a release of radioactive material, and would only result in reactor down time.
EBR2, the IFR test reactor was built and operated. I'm not sure if you meant to imply that it wasn't. Of course, a commercial - scale power generating IFR has not been built, so it's still a highly experimental technology, but the test reactor was built and tested.
"Today, they simply ask the Fed to print more money for them to borrow."
The FED only lends money to banks, who lend it out for loans to private industry. Believe it or not, the majority of the domestic national debt it owed to . . . the U.S. government. Social security has been collecting a surplus of money since its inception, and the government has been spending that, and issuing bonds to repay what they took from the program at a later date (presumably they will pay for it by raising the federal income tax). The rest of the national debt is owed to private investors who purchased bonds from the government at a fixed rate of return, much of this money is owed to foreign entities. To finance a deficit, the government issues more bonds, which it must repay later with interest.
The FED isn't some huge conspiracy, a bunch of banks got together and tried to find a way to end the volatility that the money market was continually facing. The primary goal of the FED is controlling inflation. People always say that inflation is out of control, I don't know what country they live in. We have very low, but always positive inflation. Most economists agree that this is the best situation. Anything else you can think of (including a commodity standard) would be much worse. It would be more volatile, and it would be hard to control inflation.
That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. The long term cost of a maglev is higher, as they require more power to operate. They're not environmentally friendly, since they use more power, and they require more infrastructure be build in the first place. And that extra speed costs you as well. If you'd like fast service despite the added cost, I'd like to point you to the eurostar, which travels at 200 mph, but is a conventional electric train. There is no good reason to use maglev over conventional tech (except for bragging rights).
"I had been under the impression that engineering degrees were generally for people who wanted to make money (in a normal-ish job) after graduation, while sciences were for people who either wanted to be, or accepted the risk of being in academia for life. Is that not the case?"
I think that anyone who wants an engineering degree for the money will be disappointed. I have a degree in chemical engineering, and I make $55,000 (that is with 10 months of experience). That sounds like a lot for being just out of school, but given the extra effort of obtaining the degree, and the amount of work that is expected from me at my job, I don't think it's a better deal than a liberal arts degree would've been. I think that the value of any degree is what you do with it. If you work to gain valuable experience, advocate yourself, and work well with others, you can make a 6 figure income with any degree.
I am in the field because I am passionate about making peoples lives better, and I feel like engineering accomplishes that. I don't want to work forever in academia, because I feel like all the mindless bureaucracy and politics of the university makes enriching the lives of others nearly impossible. Of course, if I did want to work forever in academics, I could still do that with an engineering degree.
It sounds like you don't have a chemistry or nuclear physics degree. College degrees are a way to get in the door at jobs that require one. Basically it's the way employers protect against hiring slackers (since fewer college grads are slackers, though some are). Hard science degrees are not worth an appreciable amount more than english degrees, though they are harder to get. Passion is the only reason you should get a hard degree (like science or engineering), because you're not going to be making a lot more money out of college*.
* your mileage may vary, some technical degrees are worth more than liberal arts degrees (particularly EE, ME and specialty engineering degrees like computer engineering), these degrees are probably not worth the extra effort if you are interested in money alone, but are good idea for someone with passion.
You're right in your assertion that lowering the discount rate devalues currency and savings, but I don't think that really hurts people who practice fiscal prudence. Most people have short term savings in the bank, but their retirement plans and their children's college funds are invested in stocks and bonds. And equity in you house is generally unaffected as well. So for the most part, lowering the rate will have positive effect on everyone concerned.
It's probably best that the money supply is not totally a "free market". The US economy could not be nearly so large and complex if investors had to contend with unstable money supply and economic conditions. Investors with a lot riding on the market are just too easily spooked by market re-valuations, and the fed basically provides them a kind of insurance against unpredictable market behavior (though not so much that they feel free to invest recklessly without threat of negative repercussions).
I'd say that any criticism of the FED should be taken with an extra large size grain of salt. This is one branch of the government that has done an excellent job of making everyone's lives better.