Fortunately, in a robust democracy capable of capping the CEO wages in the first place, The People will be able to see and react to such chicanery, modifying the rules to prevent greedy sociopaths from openly trampling the entire spirit of the law. Only in a thoroughly broken democracy like the US is the argument "the super-rich could get away with something if they're not stopped" used to support the conclusion "therefore we shouldn't even try stopping blatant abuse and corruption."
Well, there is one additional factor generally necessary to be an eight-figure-income CEO, called "networking" (or "nepotism" in older sources). If you are the child of an eight-figure-salary CEO, so you go to the prestigious private schools with other eight-figure-salary CEO's children, then join the ivy league frat with the billionaires' kids, you'll be handed at least a six- or seven-figure management position straight out of school, and be allowed to hang out at the country club with the older oligarchs. Then, once you've demonstrated a better than, say, seventy percent probability that you're not such a complete fuckup that you'll destroy an entire company before the top shareholders can grab their loot, you'll be handed the seven- to eight-figure salary position. The limited "networking" social circle of the oligarchy keeps the common riffraff of penis pill scammers from directly competing against the prior generation oligarchs' kids, despite being equally capable for the job.
Yes, it's a difficult tradeoff, and what you can tell with position information is nothing close to what you can get from a dedicated high resolution instrument (with a tiny sample volume). Note this highly informative post further down the thread by a working MRI physicist, indicating some level currently obtainable, from which one might expect gradual improvements with fancier instrumentation (squids! squids everywhere!).
It also doesn't help that the product photography isn't top-notch. It's at the competent amateur level --- no glaring technical deficiencies in basic lighting, but fairly uninspired (and with what I'd consider mistakes in more subjective composition/lighting choices). Not saying I could do much better --- I'm also only at the "competent amateur" photographer level; however, I can certainly spot the difference between this and top-notch results (like you see in Apple's own professionally done product photography). A bit more work to improve the photography above the "competent documentary mugshots" level would go a long way towards better showcasing why these products were considered "stunning" at the time (... often in large part due to excellent product photography produced out by Apple).
NMR for chemical structure and MRI for imaging both rely on the same physics principles (signals emitted by polarized nuclei precessing in a magnetic field). However, there will be significant differences in the hardware optimized for each task (not a software matter of "reprogramming the machine"). Imaging (MRI) hardware is primarily interested in answering the question "where are the nuclei located?", while chemical NMR is about getting an extremely precise measurement of "how fast are the nuclei precessing" to see the tiny frequency shifts caused by interactions with electron structure. A typical imaging MRI hardware system will have nowhere near the sensitivity to fine chemical frequency shifts to indicate much more than the most crude chemical environment differences (not picking up trace levels of particular molecules). For a rough analogy, consider the difference in hardware for triangulating where a radio signal is coming from, versus decoding a message in a radio transmission --- hardware optimized for one task won't be "reprogrammable" to do another. Of course, as NMR/MRI technology improves, people are able to get more and more precise chemical composition information at the same time as measuring the position/density of nuclei.
Yes, you can just throw power away when you don't need it (alternately, meaning that you've wastefully built beyond capacity on combined nuclear+solar+etc.) --- which wastes energy that could be offsetting fossil fuels (so long as they're still used somewhere).
Here's the Wikipedia page on pumping water uphill --- actually, a reasonably efficient and well-proven strategy already in large scale use. It generally only works in situations where you'd already have hydroelectric power, so it's not a solution for the whole country; but, one among many components of a large scale energy storing grid.
The big issue with solar/wind not being a base load supply is that, when deployed on a large scale, are incompatible with base load supplies optimized for moderately constant use. If you have solar supplying 150% of local energy demand at peak (and 0% overnight), then any constant base load supply is wasted during the peak (and possibly insufficient overnight). To complement solar/wind supplies with highly variable short-term fluctuations, you *don't* want a steady base load; you need something that can ramp up and down power production on few-minute timescales (every time a cloud passes over your city). Specifically, this means that power *storage* becomes much more important than power *generation* --- you need ways to soak up the excess power above instantaneous production at peak, and release it as needed during lower production. Nuclear power doesn't help with this. However, development of large-scale power storage technology is feasible to complement the more "opportunistic" and irregular power production patterns of many renewable resources (in combination with "smart grid" approaches to optimally schedule power consumption that can be moved around).
Replacing fossil fuels base load is only primarily useful during transition periods before fluctuating-output renewables provide a large portion of the energy supply (possibly >100% consumption during peaks). While third-generation reactors as you noted resolve many of the operating safety issues of old designs, they still have big long-term waste disposal/storage issues. Also note that the Wikipedia page you referenced lists major cost and time over-runs as features of the construction process so far...
An overemphasis on nuclear power also risks empowering the nuclear industry (with highly concentrated wealth, thus political power, and big overlap with the scummy Big Energy industry that brings us fossil fuels) screwing up the political process just like Big Oil has done, to prevent more distributed (less centralized profits for energy oligarchs) renewable energy systems. Breaking the political power of Big Oil and Big Coal is important to advancing clean, renewable alternatives; having the same political/financial interests come back as Big Nuclear won't help the political side of energy production, which drives a lot of the absolutely terrible (but highly profitable) energy policies of today. I also "trust" the genius of corner-cutting megacorporate managers to find new and creative ways to produce environmental disasters even from improved Generation III designs.
No, the "next-generation" new nuclear plants are not ready "now." The initial stage of drawing up engineering plans is ready "now," but big projects like that don't pop out of the 3D printer from CAD drawings overnight. No matter how well planned you think they are now, going from "this looks perfect on paper" engineering designs to validated safe working actual implementations takes a lot of time and effort. Billion dollar high tech construction projects don't happen overnight --- with something of that scale, there will *always* be snags and overruns along the way, requiring a decade+ efforts to actually implement (just like pushing solar from "good buy in sunny areas if you can afford a decade investment" to "you'd have to be crazy not to" levels). And then, you still have the waste handling/disposal issues (perhaps significantly reduced from worst-case old generation designs, but still far from trivial).
I'm not firmly set against nuclear, but I think it often gets a bit too much credit from techno-optimists (just as it gets unfounded extreme fear from some sectors) as a "silver bullet" solution, without fully accounting for the cost and complexity involved. The most optimistic predictions of nuclear enthusiasts --- "see how great this design looks on paper; there won't be any cost or time over-runs churning these out on mass scale, and the waste problems are negligible" --- are not what I'd give full credit for comparing against somewhat more expensive solar options that you can actually have on your roof within a month as soon as you want (and that means you, personally, without waiting for governments and multibillion dollar corporations to put together the pieces).
By the time "ready right now" next-gen nuclear is actually production ready, solar/wind/etc. will also be significantly further along. For the base load issue, the problem changes from "continuous base load production" (which nuclear might provide) to "storage capacity to fill in short-term peaks" (which nuclear sucks at). Combinations of home-scale battery power (think having everyone's electric-car-sized battery pack available for smoothing out grid load overnight) with larger-scale centralized energy storage (pumping water uphill; molten salts thermal storage; spinning up biofuel generators for emergency shortages; etc.) seem promising.
You're demanding that solar be fully cost effective *right now,* yet giving nuclear a 20 year deployment time "now" to reach maturity. In 20 years of intensive solar development, I suspect one can do significantly better than halve your "twice as expensive" current cost estimate. Of course, if zero dollars (rounded to the nearest billion, which is the minimum scale that actually matters for national energy infrastructure --- below that, you're just kidding around) is put into advancing and rolling out solar, while hundreds of ~$1B nuclear reactors are built, then nuclear might progress a bit faster (and solar will indeed take 50+ years, e.g. "we'll have flying cars by then for sure" never). The trajectory for solar power generation --- in combination with a range of other clean/renewable energy sources where more suited, e.g. wind/hydro/geothermal/etc. --- is extremely promising, even using more pessimistic estimates for rates of technological materials/manufacturing development.
I think if you gave solar a similar "benefit of the doubt" to nuclear options, instead of comparing solar today against the more optimistic predictions of nuclear advocates for 20 years from now, that nuclear wouldn't be so "obvious" a win. Couple this with the important sociopolitical ramifications of solar --- that it can be deployed with decent efficiencies of scale on individual middle-class homeowner income scales, instead of centralized under control of multibillion dollar energy profiteer corporations (e.g. you, instead of BP and Friends, could be in control of a big chunk of energy policy) --- and solar seems pretty good.
Sorry, I guess there is no common ground between your utterly amoral "might makes right" worldview of turning the worst aspects of human nature into "deserved" outcomes, and anything I'd consider a remotely plausible philosophical system. You wanted a Godwinning? Here it is: I suppose you think that Jews in 1940s Germany deserved to get rounded up and murdered by Nazis, because by then that's exactly what they should have expected Nazi nature to do. For me, there is a reason why "expect" and "deserve" are separate words: they actually do have different reasons, as used by everyone except a few twisted extremists like yourself, who have to go out of of their way to intentionally erase the crucial philosophical distinction between "expected" and "deserved" outcomes.
Solar power is not something that China can sell to Nevadans.
Apparently, you don't understand a pretty important part of how solar power works. See, just having lots of sunlight shining down on you does't magically get absorbed into the power grid and provide useful solar power. You need these things called "solar cells" to capture the sunlight and convert it into more useful energy forms. Nevada, like much of the US, already has plenty of sunlight (no need to import that from China), but solar cells to put in the sunlight are the primary limiting factor in the rollout of solar power.
And technological progress may not come on a "first come, first serve" basis, but it also doesn't spring out of empty air when no one is working on it. When you have a large system of solar cell factories and solar cell research programs, then you produce the technological progress to improve solar cell production (resulting in lower prices and higher availability for the US public). When you have virtually no domestic manufacturing capacity, the benefits of improved technological know-how in solar cell production typically accrue to the group that holds a monopoly on large-scale production (e.g. Chinese government-backed corporations), leaving the rate and cost of deployment to US citizens at whatever level maximizes China's profits/interests, rather than perhaps what is best for US national energy policy.
That system works when the minority party has any honest interest in negotiating. The present Republican party typically acts in ideological lockstep with a stance of "negotiating means doing EVERYTHING EXACTLY OUR WAY NO COMPROMISE." The filibusters aren't over negotiating small adjustments on middle ground to make things work better, but demanding ridiculously partisan extreme overhauls.
You didn't simply say that one should expect violence for, e.g., a sit-in protest --- you said one would *deserve* it.
I know to *expect* violence for pissing off the KKK, or whoever the current protector of status-quo injustice is. That's well proven by history, and I have no quarrel with the statement that it is in the "nature" of KKK goons to beat up a protestor against systematic injustice (responding to "violence" with violence). However, unlike you, I'm not going to side with them and call it "deserved" --- violence by an oppressor in response to "violence" (often of a far less harmful kind) by the oppressed does not stand on equal moral/ethical footing.
Mod parent up. Problems with police state brutality aren't solved by becoming more terrorized by the mythology of lurking badguys around every corner, who will rob you blind if you don't have big enough locks and guns. If the police are a threat to your property, you don't need bigger locks to keep joyriders out --- you need to stop being so terrified of "teh badguys" that you allow police to waltz around stealing your stuff.
Wind works great where there's wind. Solar works great where there's sun. Hydroelectric works where there's falling water, and geothermal is nice when you're living on a volcano. The future of a robust, distributed renewable energy infrastructure is going to take inputs from all sorts of solutions where most practical, not an "eggs all in one basket" approach like ditching solar for wind. China may not be a world leader in wind power today (though, I bet they could churn out wind turbines just fine, given how they're establishing a lock on heavy industry and manufacturing) --- but that doesn't mean it's a smart move to cede national energy sovereignty from other major sources just because you can lead on one small sector of the whole.
Why is every "violent" action (even under your expansive definition) "well-deserving" of a violent response? If violence is undertaken to prevent/change a wrong, is counter-violence equally "well deserved"? So, if you sit-in to "force yourself" upon others to end, e.g., segregation, do you "deserve" to be beaten up? Maybe have your house firebombed, or your family lynched, for daring to do "violence" against the interests of the wealthy and privileged?
You wouldn't be alone in considering such responses "well-deserved" --- you'd be in the company of every KKK member who ever considered giving uppity negroes their "(well deserved) violent response" for daring to oppose the social order. However, I personally disagree with you and the KKK that "forcing yourself on others" to end injustice is "deserving" of violent retaliation.
That was my point, about "oligarchs that bribe governments." The Chase Bank executives handling billions of dollars of money laundering for drug cartels (at the risk of a slap-on-the-wrist fine and zero chance of jail) will get to play Astronaut right alongside their mafia drug lord buddies, perhaps with some Big Tobacco murder executives thrown into the mix to round things out.
That providing luxury services to the wealthy top echelons of organized crime is a fine way to make money, little different from providing luxury services to the top echelons of "legit" oligarchs who have bothered to bribe enough governments to make their crimes against humanity legal on paper?
The big US government-subsidized solar production efforts like Solyndra failed because the *Chinese* government put up *even bigger subsidies* for their own research and production (without which, Solyndra was originally in line to be solidly financially successful). So, China will control the major energy technology sectors in the upcoming century, and America will become a technological laggard dependent on Chinese technology and manufacturing. Brilliant long-term planning for critical national infrastructure needs and technological leadership!
China is a country with actual intelligent leadership and planning for long-term stability. They may be repressive authoritarian fucks, but at least they're not repressive authoritarian fucks like the Republican party who will also run their country into the ground for short-term greed.
Standard formats are part of it --- but, often, by the time you've produced a "standard format" you've lost the ability to use whatever capabilities you were using the proprietary software for in the first place. Sure, I can dump my Mathematica notebook inputs to a text file, or make a PDF with all the pretty graphics --- at which point I've rendered the content useless from a functional point of view. A collaborator without their own Mathematica license can't run my algorithm over their own inputs from a PDF. My results will be useless if I come back a decade from now, and Mathematica is a defunct product (or just modified with no backwards support). There is also the issue I've repeatedly referred to above --- if proprietary software fails when you're right in the middle of working on something, you're boned (and probability of failure is often built-in to high end packages with elaborate and flakey DRM license-checking schemes). With Free Software, you can pop the hood and fix whatever's stuck to get moving again.
Yes, if you're just using the proprietary software as an ephemeral intermediate step, with no need to ever share or reproduce the results (... which is often a rather high priority for doing science...), then it won't matter so much what software was used to produce some final result in a standard form. But, for scientific work, the end result --- the fact that my calculated answer is 5.73826(23) --- is usually worthless without also being able to share, explain, modify, and reproduce the whole process leading to the answer; a proprietary "black box" stage in the procedure is blatantly un-scientific. Software and the output are naturally "conflated" when integrity and communicability of the whole process leading to a result are important.
I use my computer for work (graduate level physics research) --- that's why I found proprietary software like Mathematica unacceptable. I can't have my research and calculations go *poof* because a licensing server coughed up a hairball. Being unable to share results with collaborators also makes anything I do *completely worthless.* My "political statement" is closely joined to the reality of getting work done, and knowing that everything I do isn't chained to the whim of some proprietary system. Experience has shown that building reliance on non-free systems is, in the long run, unacceptably dangerous for anything of importance. I use some non-free software for play; but, for anything that will screw me over if it stops working tomorrow (or when I want to dig out the results a decade from now), free software is the *only* responsible choice.
Ha ha ha, a link to a shill piece from the far-right propaganda think-tank "Heritage Foundation." Yeah, that's an unbiased way to measure freedom.
The most recent government transition after Chavez death has been troubled; nonetheless, it doesn't negate past decades of quite significant progress for the Venezuelan people under socialist use of oil money. No, oil profits definitely aren't indefinitely sustainable; but, their past employment to produce a much more healthy, literate, democratically involved general populace will certainly place Venezuela in a better position to transition to future alternative economics sources. Given the general alternative supported by the US in South America, of installing murderous far-right dictators who gut their country's resources (shoveling billions of dollars to foreign investors, while leaving their countries in crippling debt and massive poverty), Venezuela has come out pretty well so far. Follow the economic model exported from the US (at gunpoint by military coup against elected leaders), and you end up like Haiti.
So you don't agree all the way with the FSF "extremist" position (which, I think, has repeatedly shown its value in countering the everyday anti-freedom extremism of corporate profiteers). However, "free" Mathematica isn't even anywhere near the "more permissive" free licenses; in general, Mathematica is a prime example of one of the most heavily locked-down, DRM'd, annoyingly-invasively-restrictively-licensed pieces of software out there. If you even think BSD/MIT-license style freedoms are valuable to encourage, then Mathematica is the wrong choice to hook young minds on.
I ended up throwing away the "free" (academically site licensed) version of Mathematica on my computer after too many instances of being randomly locked out of my own work (requiring calls/emails/faxes to appease Mathematica's finicky licensing code). In that sense, Mathematica has been quite educational for me: it cemented the lesson to never trust locked-down proprietary software, no matter how slick and useful it might seem.
I do not approve of every action taken, especially some tomfoolery in the recent transition period. However, the record of Venezuela over the past several decades has been one of solid improvement and uplift for the overwhelming majority of the population --- increases in healthcare, nutrition, education, political access, etc., that correlate with significant increases across just about any "quality of life" indicator you choose.
Have you actually been following the economic situation in, e.g., the good ol' Capitalist USA? Would you say that giving ironclad control of societal wealth to a tiny oligarchical elite has lead to stunning advances for the majority of Americans over the past few decades? Because *that* would be pretty ignorant of the facts on the ground.
Yes, there is room for improvement in Venezuela. Turning over oil profits to BP instead of spending them "socialistically" for the national public good would not be heading in a helpful direction.
If you consider the "software freedoms" of the Free Software movement to be entirely void of meaning, then that philosophical stance would seem just "new speak." Why do you think Free Software (as in Speech) does not provide real freedom not found in proprietary lock-in to free (temporarily, at least) as in beer? Do you not think that the Free Software environment produced around, e.g., the Gnu utilities and the Linux kernel has not contributed positively to society, and it is not worth fostering such goals and aspirations in future generations?
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Fortunately, in a robust democracy capable of capping the CEO wages in the first place, The People will be able to see and react to such chicanery, modifying the rules to prevent greedy sociopaths from openly trampling the entire spirit of the law. Only in a thoroughly broken democracy like the US is the argument "the super-rich could get away with something if they're not stopped" used to support the conclusion "therefore we shouldn't even try stopping blatant abuse and corruption."
Well, there is one additional factor generally necessary to be an eight-figure-income CEO, called "networking" (or "nepotism" in older sources). If you are the child of an eight-figure-salary CEO, so you go to the prestigious private schools with other eight-figure-salary CEO's children, then join the ivy league frat with the billionaires' kids, you'll be handed at least a six- or seven-figure management position straight out of school, and be allowed to hang out at the country club with the older oligarchs. Then, once you've demonstrated a better than, say, seventy percent probability that you're not such a complete fuckup that you'll destroy an entire company before the top shareholders can grab their loot, you'll be handed the seven- to eight-figure salary position. The limited "networking" social circle of the oligarchy keeps the common riffraff of penis pill scammers from directly competing against the prior generation oligarchs' kids, despite being equally capable for the job.
Yes, it's a difficult tradeoff, and what you can tell with position information is nothing close to what you can get from a dedicated high resolution instrument (with a tiny sample volume). Note this highly informative post further down the thread by a working MRI physicist, indicating some level currently obtainable, from which one might expect gradual improvements with fancier instrumentation (squids! squids everywhere!).
It also doesn't help that the product photography isn't top-notch. It's at the competent amateur level --- no glaring technical deficiencies in basic lighting, but fairly uninspired (and with what I'd consider mistakes in more subjective composition/lighting choices). Not saying I could do much better --- I'm also only at the "competent amateur" photographer level; however, I can certainly spot the difference between this and top-notch results (like you see in Apple's own professionally done product photography). A bit more work to improve the photography above the "competent documentary mugshots" level would go a long way towards better showcasing why these products were considered "stunning" at the time (... often in large part due to excellent product photography produced out by Apple).
NMR for chemical structure and MRI for imaging both rely on the same physics principles (signals emitted by polarized nuclei precessing in a magnetic field). However, there will be significant differences in the hardware optimized for each task (not a software matter of "reprogramming the machine"). Imaging (MRI) hardware is primarily interested in answering the question "where are the nuclei located?", while chemical NMR is about getting an extremely precise measurement of "how fast are the nuclei precessing" to see the tiny frequency shifts caused by interactions with electron structure. A typical imaging MRI hardware system will have nowhere near the sensitivity to fine chemical frequency shifts to indicate much more than the most crude chemical environment differences (not picking up trace levels of particular molecules). For a rough analogy, consider the difference in hardware for triangulating where a radio signal is coming from, versus decoding a message in a radio transmission --- hardware optimized for one task won't be "reprogrammable" to do another. Of course, as NMR/MRI technology improves, people are able to get more and more precise chemical composition information at the same time as measuring the position/density of nuclei.
Yes, you can just throw power away when you don't need it (alternately, meaning that you've wastefully built beyond capacity on combined nuclear+solar+etc.) --- which wastes energy that could be offsetting fossil fuels (so long as they're still used somewhere).
Here's the Wikipedia page on pumping water uphill --- actually, a reasonably efficient and well-proven strategy already in large scale use. It generally only works in situations where you'd already have hydroelectric power, so it's not a solution for the whole country; but, one among many components of a large scale energy storing grid.
The big issue with solar/wind not being a base load supply is that, when deployed on a large scale, are incompatible with base load supplies optimized for moderately constant use. If you have solar supplying 150% of local energy demand at peak (and 0% overnight), then any constant base load supply is wasted during the peak (and possibly insufficient overnight). To complement solar/wind supplies with highly variable short-term fluctuations, you *don't* want a steady base load; you need something that can ramp up and down power production on few-minute timescales (every time a cloud passes over your city). Specifically, this means that power *storage* becomes much more important than power *generation* --- you need ways to soak up the excess power above instantaneous production at peak, and release it as needed during lower production. Nuclear power doesn't help with this. However, development of large-scale power storage technology is feasible to complement the more "opportunistic" and irregular power production patterns of many renewable resources (in combination with "smart grid" approaches to optimally schedule power consumption that can be moved around).
Replacing fossil fuels base load is only primarily useful during transition periods before fluctuating-output renewables provide a large portion of the energy supply (possibly >100% consumption during peaks). While third-generation reactors as you noted resolve many of the operating safety issues of old designs, they still have big long-term waste disposal/storage issues. Also note that the Wikipedia page you referenced lists major cost and time over-runs as features of the construction process so far...
An overemphasis on nuclear power also risks empowering the nuclear industry (with highly concentrated wealth, thus political power, and big overlap with the scummy Big Energy industry that brings us fossil fuels) screwing up the political process just like Big Oil has done, to prevent more distributed (less centralized profits for energy oligarchs) renewable energy systems. Breaking the political power of Big Oil and Big Coal is important to advancing clean, renewable alternatives; having the same political/financial interests come back as Big Nuclear won't help the political side of energy production, which drives a lot of the absolutely terrible (but highly profitable) energy policies of today. I also "trust" the genius of corner-cutting megacorporate managers to find new and creative ways to produce environmental disasters even from improved Generation III designs.
No, the "next-generation" new nuclear plants are not ready "now." The initial stage of drawing up engineering plans is ready "now," but big projects like that don't pop out of the 3D printer from CAD drawings overnight. No matter how well planned you think they are now, going from "this looks perfect on paper" engineering designs to validated safe working actual implementations takes a lot of time and effort. Billion dollar high tech construction projects don't happen overnight --- with something of that scale, there will *always* be snags and overruns along the way, requiring a decade+ efforts to actually implement (just like pushing solar from "good buy in sunny areas if you can afford a decade investment" to "you'd have to be crazy not to" levels). And then, you still have the waste handling/disposal issues (perhaps significantly reduced from worst-case old generation designs, but still far from trivial).
I'm not firmly set against nuclear, but I think it often gets a bit too much credit from techno-optimists (just as it gets unfounded extreme fear from some sectors) as a "silver bullet" solution, without fully accounting for the cost and complexity involved. The most optimistic predictions of nuclear enthusiasts --- "see how great this design looks on paper; there won't be any cost or time over-runs churning these out on mass scale, and the waste problems are negligible" --- are not what I'd give full credit for comparing against somewhat more expensive solar options that you can actually have on your roof within a month as soon as you want (and that means you, personally, without waiting for governments and multibillion dollar corporations to put together the pieces).
By the time "ready right now" next-gen nuclear is actually production ready, solar/wind/etc. will also be significantly further along. For the base load issue, the problem changes from "continuous base load production" (which nuclear might provide) to "storage capacity to fill in short-term peaks" (which nuclear sucks at). Combinations of home-scale battery power (think having everyone's electric-car-sized battery pack available for smoothing out grid load overnight) with larger-scale centralized energy storage (pumping water uphill; molten salts thermal storage; spinning up biofuel generators for emergency shortages; etc.) seem promising.
You're demanding that solar be fully cost effective *right now,* yet giving nuclear a 20 year deployment time "now" to reach maturity. In 20 years of intensive solar development, I suspect one can do significantly better than halve your "twice as expensive" current cost estimate. Of course, if zero dollars (rounded to the nearest billion, which is the minimum scale that actually matters for national energy infrastructure --- below that, you're just kidding around) is put into advancing and rolling out solar, while hundreds of ~$1B nuclear reactors are built, then nuclear might progress a bit faster (and solar will indeed take 50+ years, e.g. "we'll have flying cars by then for sure" never). The trajectory for solar power generation --- in combination with a range of other clean/renewable energy sources where more suited, e.g. wind/hydro/geothermal/etc. --- is extremely promising, even using more pessimistic estimates for rates of technological materials/manufacturing development.
I think if you gave solar a similar "benefit of the doubt" to nuclear options, instead of comparing solar today against the more optimistic predictions of nuclear advocates for 20 years from now, that nuclear wouldn't be so "obvious" a win. Couple this with the important sociopolitical ramifications of solar --- that it can be deployed with decent efficiencies of scale on individual middle-class homeowner income scales, instead of centralized under control of multibillion dollar energy profiteer corporations (e.g. you, instead of BP and Friends, could be in control of a big chunk of energy policy) --- and solar seems pretty good.
Sorry, I guess there is no common ground between your utterly amoral "might makes right" worldview of turning the worst aspects of human nature into "deserved" outcomes, and anything I'd consider a remotely plausible philosophical system. You wanted a Godwinning? Here it is: I suppose you think that Jews in 1940s Germany deserved to get rounded up and murdered by Nazis, because by then that's exactly what they should have expected Nazi nature to do. For me, there is a reason why "expect" and "deserve" are separate words: they actually do have different reasons, as used by everyone except a few twisted extremists like yourself, who have to go out of of their way to intentionally erase the crucial philosophical distinction between "expected" and "deserved" outcomes.
Solar power is not something that China can sell to Nevadans.
Apparently, you don't understand a pretty important part of how solar power works. See, just having lots of sunlight shining down on you does't magically get absorbed into the power grid and provide useful solar power. You need these things called "solar cells" to capture the sunlight and convert it into more useful energy forms. Nevada, like much of the US, already has plenty of sunlight (no need to import that from China), but solar cells to put in the sunlight are the primary limiting factor in the rollout of solar power.
And technological progress may not come on a "first come, first serve" basis, but it also doesn't spring out of empty air when no one is working on it. When you have a large system of solar cell factories and solar cell research programs, then you produce the technological progress to improve solar cell production (resulting in lower prices and higher availability for the US public). When you have virtually no domestic manufacturing capacity, the benefits of improved technological know-how in solar cell production typically accrue to the group that holds a monopoly on large-scale production (e.g. Chinese government-backed corporations), leaving the rate and cost of deployment to US citizens at whatever level maximizes China's profits/interests, rather than perhaps what is best for US national energy policy.
That system works when the minority party has any honest interest in negotiating. The present Republican party typically acts in ideological lockstep with a stance of "negotiating means doing EVERYTHING EXACTLY OUR WAY NO COMPROMISE." The filibusters aren't over negotiating small adjustments on middle ground to make things work better, but demanding ridiculously partisan extreme overhauls.
You didn't simply say that one should expect violence for, e.g., a sit-in protest --- you said one would *deserve* it.
I know to *expect* violence for pissing off the KKK, or whoever the current protector of status-quo injustice is. That's well proven by history, and I have no quarrel with the statement that it is in the "nature" of KKK goons to beat up a protestor against systematic injustice (responding to "violence" with violence). However, unlike you, I'm not going to side with them and call it "deserved" --- violence by an oppressor in response to "violence" (often of a far less harmful kind) by the oppressed does not stand on equal moral/ethical footing.
Mod parent up. Problems with police state brutality aren't solved by becoming more terrorized by the mythology of lurking badguys around every corner, who will rob you blind if you don't have big enough locks and guns. If the police are a threat to your property, you don't need bigger locks to keep joyriders out --- you need to stop being so terrified of "teh badguys" that you allow police to waltz around stealing your stuff.
Wind works great where there's wind. Solar works great where there's sun. Hydroelectric works where there's falling water, and geothermal is nice when you're living on a volcano. The future of a robust, distributed renewable energy infrastructure is going to take inputs from all sorts of solutions where most practical, not an "eggs all in one basket" approach like ditching solar for wind. China may not be a world leader in wind power today (though, I bet they could churn out wind turbines just fine, given how they're establishing a lock on heavy industry and manufacturing) --- but that doesn't mean it's a smart move to cede national energy sovereignty from other major sources just because you can lead on one small sector of the whole.
Why is every "violent" action (even under your expansive definition) "well-deserving" of a violent response? If violence is undertaken to prevent/change a wrong, is counter-violence equally "well deserved"? So, if you sit-in to "force yourself" upon others to end, e.g., segregation, do you "deserve" to be beaten up? Maybe have your house firebombed, or your family lynched, for daring to do "violence" against the interests of the wealthy and privileged?
You wouldn't be alone in considering such responses "well-deserved" --- you'd be in the company of every KKK member who ever considered giving uppity negroes their "(well deserved) violent response" for daring to oppose the social order. However, I personally disagree with you and the KKK that "forcing yourself on others" to end injustice is "deserving" of violent retaliation.
That was my point, about "oligarchs that bribe governments." The Chase Bank executives handling billions of dollars of money laundering for drug cartels (at the risk of a slap-on-the-wrist fine and zero chance of jail) will get to play Astronaut right alongside their mafia drug lord buddies, perhaps with some Big Tobacco murder executives thrown into the mix to round things out.
That providing luxury services to the wealthy top echelons of organized crime is a fine way to make money, little different from providing luxury services to the top echelons of "legit" oligarchs who have bothered to bribe enough governments to make their crimes against humanity legal on paper?
The big US government-subsidized solar production efforts like Solyndra failed because the *Chinese* government put up *even bigger subsidies* for their own research and production (without which, Solyndra was originally in line to be solidly financially successful). So, China will control the major energy technology sectors in the upcoming century, and America will become a technological laggard dependent on Chinese technology and manufacturing. Brilliant long-term planning for critical national infrastructure needs and technological leadership!
China is a country with actual intelligent leadership and planning for long-term stability. They may be repressive authoritarian fucks, but at least they're not repressive authoritarian fucks like the Republican party who will also run their country into the ground for short-term greed.
Standard formats are part of it --- but, often, by the time you've produced a "standard format" you've lost the ability to use whatever capabilities you were using the proprietary software for in the first place. Sure, I can dump my Mathematica notebook inputs to a text file, or make a PDF with all the pretty graphics --- at which point I've rendered the content useless from a functional point of view. A collaborator without their own Mathematica license can't run my algorithm over their own inputs from a PDF. My results will be useless if I come back a decade from now, and Mathematica is a defunct product (or just modified with no backwards support). There is also the issue I've repeatedly referred to above --- if proprietary software fails when you're right in the middle of working on something, you're boned (and probability of failure is often built-in to high end packages with elaborate and flakey DRM license-checking schemes). With Free Software, you can pop the hood and fix whatever's stuck to get moving again.
Yes, if you're just using the proprietary software as an ephemeral intermediate step, with no need to ever share or reproduce the results (... which is often a rather high priority for doing science ...), then it won't matter so much what software was used to produce some final result in a standard form. But, for scientific work, the end result --- the fact that my calculated answer is 5.73826(23) --- is usually worthless without also being able to share, explain, modify, and reproduce the whole process leading to the answer; a proprietary "black box" stage in the procedure is blatantly un-scientific. Software and the output are naturally "conflated" when integrity and communicability of the whole process leading to a result are important.
I use my computer for work (graduate level physics research) --- that's why I found proprietary software like Mathematica unacceptable. I can't have my research and calculations go *poof* because a licensing server coughed up a hairball. Being unable to share results with collaborators also makes anything I do *completely worthless.* My "political statement" is closely joined to the reality of getting work done, and knowing that everything I do isn't chained to the whim of some proprietary system. Experience has shown that building reliance on non-free systems is, in the long run, unacceptably dangerous for anything of importance. I use some non-free software for play; but, for anything that will screw me over if it stops working tomorrow (or when I want to dig out the results a decade from now), free software is the *only* responsible choice.
Ha ha ha, a link to a shill piece from the far-right propaganda think-tank "Heritage Foundation." Yeah, that's an unbiased way to measure freedom.
The most recent government transition after Chavez death has been troubled; nonetheless, it doesn't negate past decades of quite significant progress for the Venezuelan people under socialist use of oil money. No, oil profits definitely aren't indefinitely sustainable; but, their past employment to produce a much more healthy, literate, democratically involved general populace will certainly place Venezuela in a better position to transition to future alternative economics sources. Given the general alternative supported by the US in South America, of installing murderous far-right dictators who gut their country's resources (shoveling billions of dollars to foreign investors, while leaving their countries in crippling debt and massive poverty), Venezuela has come out pretty well so far. Follow the economic model exported from the US (at gunpoint by military coup against elected leaders), and you end up like Haiti.
So you don't agree all the way with the FSF "extremist" position (which, I think, has repeatedly shown its value in countering the everyday anti-freedom extremism of corporate profiteers). However, "free" Mathematica isn't even anywhere near the "more permissive" free licenses; in general, Mathematica is a prime example of one of the most heavily locked-down, DRM'd, annoyingly-invasively-restrictively-licensed pieces of software out there. If you even think BSD/MIT-license style freedoms are valuable to encourage, then Mathematica is the wrong choice to hook young minds on.
I ended up throwing away the "free" (academically site licensed) version of Mathematica on my computer after too many instances of being randomly locked out of my own work (requiring calls/emails/faxes to appease Mathematica's finicky licensing code). In that sense, Mathematica has been quite educational for me: it cemented the lesson to never trust locked-down proprietary software, no matter how slick and useful it might seem.
I do not approve of every action taken, especially some tomfoolery in the recent transition period. However, the record of Venezuela over the past several decades has been one of solid improvement and uplift for the overwhelming majority of the population --- increases in healthcare, nutrition, education, political access, etc., that correlate with significant increases across just about any "quality of life" indicator you choose.
Have you actually been following the economic situation in, e.g., the good ol' Capitalist USA? Would you say that giving ironclad control of societal wealth to a tiny oligarchical elite has lead to stunning advances for the majority of Americans over the past few decades? Because *that* would be pretty ignorant of the facts on the ground.
Yes, there is room for improvement in Venezuela. Turning over oil profits to BP instead of spending them "socialistically" for the national public good would not be heading in a helpful direction.
If you consider the "software freedoms" of the Free Software movement to be entirely void of meaning, then that philosophical stance would seem just "new speak." Why do you think Free Software (as in Speech) does not provide real freedom not found in proprietary lock-in to free (temporarily, at least) as in beer? Do you not think that the Free Software environment produced around, e.g., the Gnu utilities and the Linux kernel has not contributed positively to society, and it is not worth fostering such goals and aspirations in future generations?