No one's threatening to invade the US because we spend about as much money on defense as the rest of the world combined.
I couldn't let this stand, it needed to be challenged. There is no need for others to invade the US. Look at what happened after 911, the Northeast Blackout of 2003, and the rolling blackouts in California in 2000 and 2001. It is relatively easy to cause a lot of distress in the US without military arms.
Hopefully this will kick some asses into actually looking into re-enrichment.
First let me state I don't believe we are going to be running out of fissible fuels for nuclear power plants anytime soon. Having said that I hope this will kick asses and make people look more seriously at alternative energy sources from geothermal to wind.
What assurances do we have that the bacteria won't mutate, self-replicate, or turn against its master in the form of some horrendous new super-bug that makes the 20,000 land-mine casualties a year seem like a drop in a bucket?
Aren't we already doing that with GE crops? Grocery stores are stocked with corn, soya bean products, and tomatoes that were genetically engineered. Try to find out which ones come from GE crops though, good luck. Monsanto and other businesses fight all attempts to label food containing GMOs. Monsanto even fought to prevent farmers from labeling their food GMO free.
I really like us to come up with better debugging techniques before we go further into these bio-engineering stuff.
You may not think much about it but ways to safely detect landmines can save a number of arms, legs, and lifes. They could help avoid another child losing a leg while playing in a field where landmines were placed.
So, what'll happen, is anywhere the mines have degraded and cracked open and are thus probably inert, will glow green, so people will avoid those "dangerous" areas, and anywhere the mines remain hermetically sealed, will not glow, thus it looks "safe" but is actually very dangerous.
If machine scanners can detect explosives what makes you think living things can't? Are these scanners just scams to get money from airports, border crossings, and seaports?
Even worse, its not failsafe. If a spot is not glowing, is that because coverage was not 100% because a vehicle was parked there, or maybe the heat from a fire killed the bacteria, or...
I agree nothing may be failsafe but...
Safest thing to do, is just ignore the results. No one benefits but the contractors, which was probably the whole point to begin with.
... these bacteria could be helpful for clearing mine fields by mine sweepers. Someone above said how Afghanistan is the most heavily mined country in the world. I don't know if it is true but it was mined when the Soviets invaded and continued to be mined after the Soviets left, in fighting between the different factions of Mujahideen. Southeast Asia was pretty heavily mined as well as Angola and other nations. Even today unexploded ordinances are found in the Ardennes region of France from WWII as well as in the US from the Civil War.
In this post where I ask "Where is the NRDC mentioned in TFA? Or is this an attempt to slam the NRDC?" That's the vary same post you replied to criticizing me.
Life would be a lot easier if you didn't work so hard at denying your mistakes. We all make them.
Apply that to yourself. You criticize me for not asking for a link where where the NRDC is criticized, but I did ask for one.
I'm not sure about bats but buildings, cars, and cats kill more birds than wind turbines do. Over one billion birds strike windows in the U.S. every year.What Kills Birds? is a list of what does kill birds. Now that's on a wind power consultant's website so some may consider it biased. But Google returns more sites saying how many birds are killed by wind turbines versus other things that kill birds.
The Natural Resources Defense Council spokesman calls fusion "snake oil". Couldn't have seen that one coming...;-)
Where and when did the NRDC say that? While the NRDC is mentioned in the summary, without a link, it is not mentioned in TFA. I searched for such a link and the only one I found was from the 1990s, '96 I think, about how the research could be used for research into nuclear weapons.
Recycling and clean manufacturing processes will become economically viable because the energy to do it will be cheap.
Even now recycling uses less energy than refining raw materials, recycling saves energy.
Wealthy people reproduce less than poor ones, so population growth will be slowed or even reversed.
Now this brings up something not many people know or realize. As people's income goes up they have fewer children and care more about the environment. When people are starving they don't care about much else but once they no longer have to fight to scratch a living they start caring about other things.
Your reading skills continue to decline. Have a look at the last two sentences of the submission.
The submission? Yea, the NRDC is mentioned there but it is not mentioned in the article, so I go back to requesting a link so I can verify for myself a rep for the NRDC said anything like that. Seeing as it's only in the submission I conclude it's there to slam the NRDC.
the technology is just beginning start getting available for realistic electric cars, and so some time in the moderate future, there may be enough electric cars on the roads that electrical power may actually make some significant inroads against oil as a transportation fuel-- but not in 1985, and the oil companies are (and were) perfectly aware of that.
I'm pretty sure there are those in the petroleum industry who know very well electric cars were made before internal combustion engine cars were released. In the 1830s "Robert Anderson of Scotland invented the first crude electric carriage." However I don't necessarily blame or think the reason electric cars didn't take over the roads was because of the petroleum industry, electric companies were pretty powerful too. And the power of coal companies wasn't something to sneeze at either.
whole, but rather why certain things are not regulated that should be.
Again I have to disagree in part. Because of pressure if not regulations and laws banks made loans to those who could not afford to pay back their mortgages. In return for making those mortgages the US government created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought the loans. Of course greed set in when real estate prices kept on rising year after year until the bubble burst.
What is scary, is that I think at the end of the show they said that currently there is still no regulation or monitoring of these swaps today
What would be scary is if investors didn't learn to distrust swaps, or derivatives, and kept on investing in businesses that create or trade them. And they'd better not be bailout out again. Taxpayers should not be made to pay for others' bad decisions.
If youre seriously proposing that without unions, we would have ridiculous work weeks and no choice about it, no ability to retire, and no regulations, you are sadly misinformed. Unions performed a useful function, but I am currently in a non-unionized shop (it consulting) and have benefits, a decent salary, and a 40-hour work week-- less if i bill a substantial amount.
You have those because unions fought for them. Without collective bargaining most people may still be working as peasants or serfs for the aristocracy.
The problem with outsourcing everything some other country can do cheaper is that we don't make ANYTHING anymore and therefore the answer is to outsource everything. We are handing our economy to third world nations.
Do you really think the US doesn't export anything and doesn't make third world nations dependent on the US? The US is a major food exporter. Because of massive subsidies to agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill these companies are able to export and sell food to the third world cheaper than third world farmers can grow food. Mexican and Central American corn farmers can't compeat with corn exported from the US. This drives those farmers off their land and out of business. About all they have left is immigration.
if the US figured out their health care mess 10 years ago or so they would likely have been fine. Couple this with the consumer and corporate greed of the housing bubble and unregulated wall street troubles (making borrowing impossible), well its no wonder they are screwed.
I agree about health care costs as well as greed but disagree with a supposedly unregulated Wall Street. Wall Street is pretty heavily regulated. The problem is with the types of regulations.
Speaking of which, you always here about some jerk CEO that was at the helm when their company lost 5 billion, and he gets a 40 million bonus or something stupid.
I opposed the bailouts but since they were given there should have been conditions on the bailouts. For instance no bonuses to those who caused the problems to begin with. Another condition should have been that those getting bailed had to be broken into smaller companies that were not too large to fail. Instead what really happened was that some got bigger.
Your back of the envelope math fails to take into account facilities and maintenance I suspect.
Profits = revenue - expenses. If GM makes a profit on each vehicle sold it makes more than it cost to make each one. Facilities and maintenance is part of the expenses.
WWII pulled us out of the great depression(which by the way seems to have been caused largely by over confidence in Free Market Deregulation.) The "New Deal" managed kept us from collapsing into abject anarchy.
What we face today is a throw back to 1929. Same shit.
What we have now is different than in 1929. In 1929-30 congress passed and President Herbert Hoover signed the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, even though more than a thousand economists warned him to veto it, which slowed international trade. When the US passed this act other nations passed their own protectionist laws. US export businesses watched as their exports shrank, they thus had to lay off workers or went out of business. This harmed other businesses such as suppliers. Like it or not international trade is necessary to a thriving economy today and has been that way for a long tyme.
As for Mr. Fusion? How about some cleaner cheaper fission first.
Nuclear power is Hooked on Subsidies. Even in countries that do not have the US's environmental regulations nuclear power isn't profitable without subsidies. "How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."
And that's a reprint on the Free Market CATO Institute of a Forbes magazine article. Finland's Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant's reactor 3, being built by the French government owned Areva, was due to be compleated this year but now is not scheduled to be compleated until 2012. It is already $2.4bn dollars (1.7bn euros) over budget.
You ask about cheaper energy, the cheapest and cleanest energy is the negawatt. Unfortunately that depends on people conserving power and most Americans will not do that.
There would be much less money and fewer jobs to go around for everybody if the banking system had been allowed to fail.
I keep hearing or reading that but I have yet to see any proof that that is true. Not all but some economists do not believe that at all, that instead those banks who had practiced due diligence when loaning money would have been left standing to continue loaning money to those who could pay it back. All the government bailout did was reward bad practices and punish good practices. Government rescued businesses too big to fail and allowed them to get bigger. Next tyme government won't be able to rescue them.
It's sort of like saying, "wow, WWII really sucked, look how many GIs got killed and how much money it cost, imagine how much better off we'd be if we'd just stayed out of it!"
Straw man. They are not even related to each other.
Slashdot Mirror
Building an all-new infrastructure vs. not and running out of fuel.
It's an easy decision, and a painful one too.
Yea, it's a painful transmission, for the Nuclear industry. But going from nuclear to geothermal, solar, wind and other sources is an easy decision.
Falcon
No one's threatening to invade the US because we spend about as much money on defense as the rest of the world combined.
I couldn't let this stand, it needed to be challenged. There is no need for others to invade the US. Look at what happened after 911, the Northeast Blackout of 2003, and the rolling blackouts in California in 2000 and 2001. It is relatively easy to cause a lot of distress in the US without military arms.
Falcon
I wonder if future generations will appreciate your decision considering the fact that our alternative is burning coal...
To say it's coal OR nuclear power is to close your eyes in the face of reality. There are more sources of energy than just those two.
Falcon
Hopefully this will kick some asses into actually looking into re-enrichment.
First let me state I don't believe we are going to be running out of fissible fuels for nuclear power plants anytime soon. Having said that I hope this will kick asses and make people look more seriously at alternative energy sources from geothermal to wind.
Falcon
Anyone else get a slightly uneasy feeling at the idea of crop-dusting entire areas of land with living bacteria that glow?
Not when a child's life can be saved. As for living bacteria in dirt, a teaspoon of dirt contains an estimated 10,000 species of bacteria. And there are organisms that naturally glow.
What assurances do we have that the bacteria won't mutate, self-replicate, or turn against its master in the form of some horrendous new super-bug that makes the 20,000 land-mine casualties a year seem like a drop in a bucket?
Aren't we already doing that with GE crops? Grocery stores are stocked with corn, soya bean products, and tomatoes that were genetically engineered. Try to find out which ones come from GE crops though, good luck. Monsanto and other businesses fight all attempts to label food containing GMOs. Monsanto even fought to prevent farmers from labeling their food GMO free.
Falcon
I really like us to come up with better debugging techniques before we go further into these bio-engineering stuff.
You may not think much about it but ways to safely detect landmines can save a number of arms, legs, and lifes. They could help avoid another child losing a leg while playing in a field where landmines were placed.
Falcon
I wonder if it works in the dark?
It glows so it should be easier to see in the dark.
Falcon
So, what'll happen, is anywhere the mines have degraded and cracked open and are thus probably inert, will glow green, so people will avoid those "dangerous" areas, and anywhere the mines remain hermetically sealed, will not glow, thus it looks "safe" but is actually very dangerous.
If machine scanners can detect explosives what makes you think living things can't? Are these scanners just scams to get money from airports, border crossings, and seaports?
Even worse, its not failsafe. If a spot is not glowing, is that because coverage was not 100% because a vehicle was parked there, or maybe the heat from a fire killed the bacteria, or ...
I agree nothing may be failsafe but...
Safest thing to do, is just ignore the results. No one benefits but the contractors, which was probably the whole point to begin with.
... these bacteria could be helpful for clearing mine fields by mine sweepers. Someone above said how Afghanistan is the most heavily mined country in the world. I don't know if it is true but it was mined when the Soviets invaded and continued to be mined after the Soviets left, in fighting between the different factions of Mujahideen. Southeast Asia was pretty heavily mined as well as Angola and other nations. Even today unexploded ordinances are found in the Ardennes region of France from WWII as well as in the US from the Civil War.
Falcon
In this post where I ask "Where is the NRDC mentioned in TFA? Or is this an attempt to slam the NRDC?" That's the vary same post you replied to criticizing me.
Life would be a lot easier if you didn't work so hard at denying your mistakes. We all make them.
Apply that to yourself. You criticize me for not asking for a link where where the NRDC is criticized, but I did ask for one.
Falcon
I'm not sure about bats but buildings, cars, and cats kill more birds than wind turbines do. Over one billion birds strike windows in the U.S. every year. What Kills Birds? is a list of what does kill birds. Now that's on a wind power consultant's website so some may consider it biased. But Google returns more sites saying how many birds are killed by wind turbines versus other things that kill birds.
Falcon
The Natural Resources Defense Council spokesman calls fusion "snake oil". Couldn't have seen that one coming... ;-)
Where and when did the NRDC say that? While the NRDC is mentioned in the summary, without a link, it is not mentioned in TFA. I searched for such a link and the only one I found was from the 1990s, '96 I think, about how the research could be used for research into nuclear weapons.
Falcon
Point one: Not spending money on fusion research is incredibly dumb.
Government subsidies fund inefficiencies and is government picking winners and losers.
Falcon
Recycling and clean manufacturing processes will become economically viable because the energy to do it will be cheap.
Even now recycling uses less energy than refining raw materials, recycling saves energy.
Wealthy people reproduce less than poor ones, so population growth will be slowed or even reversed.
Now this brings up something not many people know or realize. As people's income goes up they have fewer children and care more about the environment. When people are starving they don't care about much else but once they no longer have to fight to scratch a living they start caring about other things.
Falcon
Your reading skills continue to decline. Have a look at the last two sentences of the submission.
The submission? Yea, the NRDC is mentioned there but it is not mentioned in the article, so I go back to requesting a link so I can verify for myself a rep for the NRDC said anything like that. Seeing as it's only in the submission I conclude it's there to slam the NRDC.
Falcon
Did you fall for the GP's assertion the NRDC was opposing this when TFA says nothing about the NRDC?
Falcon
So a member of an anti-nuke group doesn't approve of someone's attempts to build a workable fusion reactor? Is anyone really surprised by that?
Where is the NRDC mentioned in TFA? Or is this an attempt to slam the NRDC?
Falcon
the technology is just beginning start getting available for realistic electric cars, and so some time in the moderate future, there may be enough electric cars on the roads that electrical power may actually make some significant inroads against oil as a transportation fuel-- but not in 1985, and the oil companies are (and were) perfectly aware of that.
I'm pretty sure there are those in the petroleum industry who know very well electric cars were made before internal combustion engine cars were released. In the 1830s "Robert Anderson of Scotland invented the first crude electric carriage." However I don't necessarily blame or think the reason electric cars didn't take over the roads was because of the petroleum industry, electric companies were pretty powerful too. And the power of coal companies wasn't something to sneeze at either.
Falcon
whole, but rather why certain things are not regulated that should be.
Again I have to disagree in part. Because of pressure if not regulations and laws banks made loans to those who could not afford to pay back their mortgages. In return for making those mortgages the US government created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought the loans. Of course greed set in when real estate prices kept on rising year after year until the bubble burst.
What is scary, is that I think at the end of the show they said that currently there is still no regulation or monitoring of these swaps today
What would be scary is if investors didn't learn to distrust swaps, or derivatives, and kept on investing in businesses that create or trade them. And they'd better not be bailout out again. Taxpayers should not be made to pay for others' bad decisions.
Falcon
If youre seriously proposing that without unions, we would have ridiculous work weeks and no choice about it, no ability to retire, and no regulations, you are sadly misinformed. Unions performed a useful function, but I am currently in a non-unionized shop (it consulting) and have benefits, a decent salary, and a 40-hour work week-- less if i bill a substantial amount.
You have those because unions fought for them. Without collective bargaining most people may still be working as peasants or serfs for the aristocracy.
Falcon
The problem with outsourcing everything some other country can do cheaper is that we don't make ANYTHING anymore and therefore the answer is to outsource everything. We are handing our economy to third world nations.
Do you really think the US doesn't export anything and doesn't make third world nations dependent on the US? The US is a major food exporter. Because of massive subsidies to agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill these companies are able to export and sell food to the third world cheaper than third world farmers can grow food. Mexican and Central American corn farmers can't compeat with corn exported from the US. This drives those farmers off their land and out of business. About all they have left is immigration.
Falcon
if the US figured out their health care mess 10 years ago or so they would likely have been fine. Couple this with the consumer and corporate greed of the housing bubble and unregulated wall street troubles (making borrowing impossible), well its no wonder they are screwed.
I agree about health care costs as well as greed but disagree with a supposedly unregulated Wall Street. Wall Street is pretty heavily regulated. The problem is with the types of regulations.
Speaking of which, you always here about some jerk CEO that was at the helm when their company lost 5 billion, and he gets a 40 million bonus or something stupid.
I opposed the bailouts but since they were given there should have been conditions on the bailouts. For instance no bonuses to those who caused the problems to begin with. Another condition should have been that those getting bailed had to be broken into smaller companies that were not too large to fail. Instead what really happened was that some got bigger.
Falcon
Your back of the envelope math fails to take into account facilities and maintenance I suspect.
Profits = revenue - expenses. If GM makes a profit on each vehicle sold it makes more than it cost to make each one. Facilities and maintenance is part of the expenses.
Falcon
the bonds generally have a face value, and they are sold at an auction to the highest bidder.
No, bonds at auction are sold to the lowest not highest bidder.
Falcon
WWII pulled us out of the great depression(which by the way seems to have been caused largely by over confidence in Free Market Deregulation.) The "New Deal" managed kept us from collapsing into abject anarchy.
You should do your own homework. Some economists believe the New Deal made the Great Depression worse than it would have been. FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate. Obama repeating mistakes of Great Depression.
What we face today is a throw back to 1929. Same shit.
What we have now is different than in 1929. In 1929-30 congress passed and President Herbert Hoover signed the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, even though more than a thousand economists warned him to veto it, which slowed international trade. When the US passed this act other nations passed their own protectionist laws. US export businesses watched as their exports shrank, they thus had to lay off workers or went out of business. This harmed other businesses such as suppliers. Like it or not international trade is necessary to a thriving economy today and has been that way for a long tyme.
As for Mr. Fusion? How about some cleaner cheaper fission first.
Nuclear power is Hooked on Subsidies. Even in countries that do not have the US's environmental regulations nuclear power isn't profitable without subsidies. "How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."
And that's a reprint on the Free Market CATO Institute of a Forbes magazine article. Finland's Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant's reactor 3, being built by the French government owned Areva, was due to be compleated this year but now is not scheduled to be compleated until 2012. It is already $2.4bn dollars (1.7bn euros) over budget.
You ask about cheaper energy, the cheapest and cleanest energy is the negawatt. Unfortunately that depends on people conserving power and most Americans will not do that.
Falcon
There would be much less money and fewer jobs to go around for everybody if the banking system had been allowed to fail.
I keep hearing or reading that but I have yet to see any proof that that is true. Not all but some economists do not believe that at all, that instead those banks who had practiced due diligence when loaning money would have been left standing to continue loaning money to those who could pay it back. All the government bailout did was reward bad practices and punish good practices. Government rescued businesses too big to fail and allowed them to get bigger. Next tyme government won't be able to rescue them.
It's sort of like saying, "wow, WWII really sucked, look how many GIs got killed and how much money it cost, imagine how much better off we'd be if we'd just stayed out of it!"
Straw man. They are not even related to each other.
Falcon