It does indeed say many thyroid cancers took years to turn up - but the number STARTED to increase right away, and it's fair to report that hasn't happened.
It seems unlikely that any effects of Fukushima will forever be impossible to count by keeping statistics. You cannot, even with Cherynobyl, ascribe a *particular* cancer case to the one cause, even there they can only say that "the cancer rate is higher by X%". They figure that some extra 4000 will die of cancer (than would have gone on to die of other causes later, of course) - but this is across hundreds of thousands exposed, so it's an increase in cancer rates of 3%-4% on that large group.
Chernobyl had the problem that they DIDN'T STOP DRINKING THE MILK in the area, the contaminated milk. Nobody made that mistake with any food near Fukishima. Worse yet, the kids in the area were iodine-deficient!
The cancer rate increase from Fukishima could be, say, a hundredth of Cherynobyl's (it's probably less), and be 0.03-0.04%... you'll never be able to say whether the number is higher or not, because the error bar on just COUNTING cancer deaths (when Grandma has cancer and dies of a heart attack, would she have had the attack without the cancer? A doctor's call on that can change the outcome.) is much higher than 0.05%.
The cancer rate around Fukishima could be, say 100,000 dead out of 300,000 people when we add them all up 60 years from now - when the stats said it should have been 101,000. Then some stats guy will have to wearily explain that it was really 101,000 plus or minus 4,000 - and if only 100,000 died, then in that area's case it would have been 99,890, because by 2020, researchers using the disputed "no threshold" model had put the probable deaths at 150.
So our real story here, is why are we caring about a death rate that is smaller than a statistical error bar that nobody gives a crap about, at least as a news story.
Unless of course they set the government up to set them up. As the Daily Show put it the other day, "The laws that allow for off-shore tax havens were not invented by poor people".
Well, I just went to Wikipedia for five minutes, but it's not really helping you. The "crime in canada" article says:
"The number of murders dropped to 594 in 2007, 12 fewer than the previous year. One-third of the 2007 murders were stabbings and another third were by firearm. In 2007, there were 190 stabbings and 188 shootings. Handguns were used in two-thirds of all firearm murders."
So, really hard to say if "blunt force trauma" is most of the remaining third, but probably is, along with strangling and eye-poking and whatnot. So it's basically one-third each to clubs/hands, knives, and guns.
For that same 2007, it says 10,086 by gun, 1796 by cutting and stabbing, 647 by blunt object, 854 by hand, 130 arson, 1016 all other reasons.
Dividing by ten to get those numbers in Canadian proportions, your 1797 stabbings become 180, about our 190 stabbings; your blunt-object+hand becomes about 150, same neck of the woods, anyway.
Only the gun numbers are really proportionally higher. Over FIVE TIMES higher.
Not my area of expertise, or a political topic I care much about, but simple stats are easy to look up. They say that while you may denigrate the source of this statistical analysis as a "cartoon", the information appears to be quite correct and your "the same murder rate just shifts to other weapons" thesis is not supported.
The Rodney King beating was taped with a video camera you could not have fit in a shoebox. Now, of course, you can do decent video with a camera you can hide in your hand.
There are certain minima to the light-collecting-spot enforced by the laws of optics, of course, but it seems clear that the police will soon not be able to tell whether they are being video'd or just watched. Glasses? They'll look like shirt buttons. And folks who know in advance the location of the police action (say, protestors) will be able to carpet an area with cameras that are very hard to spot.
A lot of cameras will just be running all the time, pointing in four directions from every bicycle helmet and car, for use in accident investigations. Anything that happens in front of any place of business will be on the private anti-theft video cameras of the business - this is all already true, but in a decade or so, it won't be a few businesses, a few cars, a few cyclists, it'll routinely be everybody.
A certain amount of the "war on photography" is about police pushing back against people *visibly* trying to intimidate them by sticking cameras in their faces; police do NOT like to be in any position but domineering control of a volatile situation - a big part of their training - so they push back hard when pushed, challenged, mocked in any way. Obeying the law is secondary to Controlling The Situation. (I have some sympathy there; it's basic human psychology that this keeps them safer; never back down before a crowd.) But people invisibly photographing them - well, what are they going to do, arrest everybody in sight of any stop-and-frisk and demand they all be subjected to some kind of wanding that will find all six cameras about their person? Police routinely get away with high-handed, illegal behaviour with one or two people who get in their face, but there are limits.
Nope, I think its a lost cause. Anything that happens in public sight will presumably be recorded, multiple times, more or less *automatically*, in a matter of years.
Everybody regards a different kind of problem as your "busted shitter" though. Proprietary software companies regard problems that won't affect sales by much to be such. There are bugs in Excel VBA 2010 that were identified in Excel 97. Microsoft just can't be bothered; nobody is going to stop the whole corporation automatically buying MS-Office because a few VBA macro fans in accounting and engineering have to do awkward workarounds. So despite having all those piles of cash to pay people do dig in to that hard, dirty thicket of code, they don't.
There's some truth in your thesis, but mostly it is disproved by the amount of large, complex, and good FLOSS projects out there. Since they are large and complex, it is utterly certain that they contained a number of your "busted shitters" on the long road from Line 1 to being PostGIS or GIMP or Drupal. And here they are. Even that fact that some or all examples have *current* "busted shitters" proves nothing as long as there are some fixed ones in the project history.
Oh, and the old FLOSS/communism association - actually FLOSS is *worse* than communism from the point of view of somebody who imagines work-organization systems to be proof of moral value or failure. It's not "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs", it's worse. From each according to his ability to write code that others agree to commit, to everybody, everything. We'll just dump mountains of free stuff on you that you didn't even ask for and *don't* need. Talk about moral hazard that disinclines you to the virtue of doing your own work! Truly, we are horrible people.
What about the guys who can shoot people legally? Now that American citizens have officially been declared "fair game", the rest of us foreigners, (who already lived only by continued forbearance), thought you'd finally get concerned...
I wasn't tops in physics, but the lecture on Faraday cages really stuck with me - no ifs ands, or buts about how it completely separates the inside from outside electromagnetic worlds. So rather than running around pulling out batteries or modifying your phone, what's so hard about a metal phone case?
You may not need a tinfoil hat, but a tinfoil pouch may not be paranoid...
The 1541 was a *serial* communicator, which kind of wasted the possible data-transfer rates off a floppy disk itself.
I recall a review of the C64 as a machine for your kid, which offered in the unkind review comment: "For both game-playing and educational software, the slow floppy disk may test the patience of most children. In fact, it would be possible for some smaller children to actually grow up while waiting for their game to start".
...about 50 countries are estimated to have it. Sometimes called "Latent", but I prefer the "Threshold" term, it has the right connotation of stepping right up to the line and voluntarily stopping.
Nation that CAN build a bomb in months flat = Nation not to stage a major invasion of. (By the time Russia, Pakistan, or the US could marshal up forces to take on a nation of 70 million, the first bombs are coming off the line).
Nation that HAS built a bomb = target
And Iran knows it.
Understanding that doesn't involve liking or trusting them. Meanwhile this has to be the ninth time in a dozen-odd years that the "Attack Iran" nuts (after their Iraq debacle, "nuts" is the only appropriate word) have played Lucy and the Football with gullible US conservatives. The big windup, then no bomb.
That issue, in turn, has far more to do with who is allowed and who is not allowed to designate a particular location as an "Al Qaeda camp".
Q: Why are they Enemies Of The State? A: Because they live in an Enemies Of The State location. Q: Why is it such a location? A: Because Enemies Of The State live there.
It never fails to amaze me how many people imagine this is some cut-and-dried obvious bit of detection, presumably with rows of tents and stacked rifles. People saw a couple of videos like that from the 90's and imagine there are still these "Al Qaeda camps" out in the desert. Currently, most drone-strike locations are somebody's family house in a village full of same. They are decreed to be targets because of the people observed going in and out.
The selection is completely unrestrained by the knowledge that any career or legal trouble will befall those who accidentally blow up the bakery.
There's a decent Wikipedia article on it. Accusing your management of allowing one of the now-classic dysfunctional management failures to grow could get some discussion going.
Note how the first sentence ends in "world's first and largest operational space launch facility".
Water is actually of very little help if you hit at more than 100 MPH. Ask the Challenger seven.
Except for 20,000 ft having weather issues of its own, your dream spaceport would be the top of Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador, 2 deg S of the equator and your first four miles up is free. Or as wikipedia puts it, the top is the furthest point on Earth from the planet's centre. I concede the thick covering of glaciers remain a technical challenge. And the status of eco-tourism mecca, a slight political one.
He didn't threaten to cut anything, but to make people pay by usage. Flat rates blind the market to resource consumption, usage-based fees open the market's eyes.
I'm sure Ghengis Khan had to do a lot of wrestling and so forth as a kid, but Julius Caesar, a patrician from birth, probably never had to touch one of the lowlife brutes he commanded, much less beat one up with his fists to establish his leadership.
Such a shame, really. When the world ended because of chemical and biological weapons that couldn't be stopped, flattened by nuclear wars....no, wait, none of that ever happened. Agreed, if you make a treaty that says "if you prepare for war, you'll have one immediately"...and then don't actually attack Japan when it starts building ships, then, yeah, they'll just break the treaty.
If you actually attack, on the other hand, the "Pax " situations have lasted for centuries on end.
Agree on all counts. I was very definitely speaking of nations. However, even here, you'll note that you are more *likely* to get rich inventing a new mousetrap these days, than by leading your neighbours to declare war on the suburb a mile over and attempting to take their houses and women. "Conan vs. SWAT" never became a successful comic.
Sure, except we haven't un-invented nuclear weapons, which remain kind of a trump over things like teenage mutant ninja soldiers since few mutations prevent you from being vaporized if sufficient joules are radiated into your mutant molecules.
So my treaty would be not so much ironclad (little naval joke there) as uranium-clad, involving capital cities becoming smoking holes, etc.
Already kind of here, really, The journalist I cited, Gwynne Dyer, as also passed along the joke told by military planners world-wide: "Q: What are the implications of nuclear Pakistan falling to radical jihadist revolutionaries? A: Traffic jam in the skies over Islamabad as five nuclear powers race to begin the bombing."
...note that in industrial civilization, riches accrue to those who best stimulate human ingenuity and productivity through peaceful trade and development, not to those who can enslave the most serfs, and that the entire basis of military arms races is basically a "caveman" mentality, obsolete since before WW1, really: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/09-6
The justification for arms races was, throughout the nuclear arms race, that we must beat the other team to the capability; except that *taking the lead* in that race is what guarantees the race to happen at all. None of the competitors in the nuclear arms race ever wanted to use one, or did; they understood that their use would make them a target, not a victor.
Bolstered by this realization, you could instead propose treaties, with open development of such technologies, and monitoring of capabilities with the spectre of a ruinously expensive and dangerous race beginning if security around secret weapons development *ever* slips.
Some of the things brought to light by the release are not just "morally wrong" in one 22-year-old's opinion, they're clearly unlawful. The UCMJ is pretty specific that not only do you have no requirement to go along with criminal orders, you have a responsibility to see the crime addressed.
When you are talking about crimes of the most pervasive sort, where support for committing them runs through the whole organization, "addressed" is clearly not going to happen with a report to the Lt 2nd Class you probably report to.
Face it: we'd never have heard of these crimes without Manning's actions. That we have heard of these crimes is a social good. There's just no getting around that.
If the results show that the harm done TO THE PUBLIC (not to some military or civilian employees who have been embarrassed) is small - and the Pentagon is clear in saying nobody was killed or injured from the released, the diplomatic fallout has been very minor - and the good done for the public is large, then any law that penalizes this action heavily is clearly not in the best interests of the public.
I think the content industries have a perfect streak going: they always oppose technologies that turn out to be, not only not harmful, but actively good for their bottom line.
Radio was going to ruin record sales. A few decades after they lost that one, they were shelling out payola to get on the air. The cassette tape recorder was going to destroy records. After losing that one, they made a mint selling everybody the same record twice, the new version being portable. VCRs were going to be to the movie industry what the Boston Strangler was to women; after the Betamax decision, they made money selling cassettes.
The lesson is, that when content industries oppose a new technology, they have to be beaten... for their OWN good....
Is the reduction not even 40% ? I'd thought it was 50% because gas turbines were also more efficient or something.
Anyway, the poster is skipping that you can't really get gas out of the ground and to the plant without a few percent loss. And since methane has 20X the infrared "X-section" of CO2, every percent lost harms the atmosphere as much as 20% of the coal effect. So 2% methane + 60% of the CO2 = Just as Bad As Coal.
Please skip all the unions-are-evil vs owners-are-evil arguments. They're irrelevant.
Unions work -and are generally necessary - when everybody does the same thing. If everybody is an interchangeable part of (typically) an assembly line or repetitive job like resource extraction, then anybody can be replaced, and people get treated like machines. And unions can strike for compensation and conditions that are the same - or at least, based on the same formula - for all those doing comparable work.
But while large bureaucracies invariably attempt to bring in assembly-line "development methodologies", development just isn't coal-mining. There's a much larger dynamic range in the amount of (good, productive) code a developer can produce in a day vs the amount of coal you can mine, so narrow pay ranges are inappropriate. And developers are not so interchangeable - a good one threatening to quit gets more than a shrug from the boss.
What you need is not a union, but a pressure group aimed at shutting down H-1B abuses. That's quite a straightforward goal.
Slashdot Mirror
Great article here on the effects of Cherynobyl: http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/backgrounder/en/index.html
It does indeed say many thyroid cancers took years to turn up - but the number STARTED to increase right away, and it's fair to report that hasn't happened.
It seems unlikely that any effects of Fukushima will forever be impossible to count by keeping statistics. You cannot, even with Cherynobyl, ascribe a *particular* cancer case to the one cause, even there they can only say that "the cancer rate is higher by X%". They figure that some extra 4000 will die of cancer (than would have gone on to die of other causes later, of course) - but this is across hundreds of thousands exposed, so it's an increase in cancer rates of 3%-4% on that large group.
Chernobyl had the problem that they DIDN'T STOP DRINKING THE MILK in the area, the contaminated milk. Nobody made that mistake with any food near Fukishima. Worse yet, the kids in the area were iodine-deficient!
The cancer rate increase from Fukishima could be, say, a hundredth of Cherynobyl's (it's probably less), and be 0.03-0.04% ... you'll never be able to say whether the number is higher or not, because the error bar on just COUNTING cancer deaths (when Grandma has cancer and dies of a heart attack, would she have had the attack without the cancer? A doctor's call on that can change the outcome.) is much higher than 0.05%.
The cancer rate around Fukishima could be, say 100,000 dead out of 300,000 people when we add them all up 60 years from now - when the stats said it should have been 101,000. Then some stats guy will have to wearily explain that it was really 101,000 plus or minus 4,000 - and if only 100,000 died, then in that area's case it would have been 99,890, because by 2020, researchers using the disputed "no threshold" model had put the probable deaths at 150.
So our real story here, is why are we caring about a death rate that is smaller than a statistical error bar that nobody gives a crap about, at least as a news story.
Unless of course they set the government up to set them up. As the Daily Show put it the other day, "The laws that allow for off-shore tax havens were not invented by poor people".
Well, I just went to Wikipedia for five minutes, but it's not really helping you. The "crime in canada" article says:
"The number of murders dropped to 594 in 2007, 12 fewer than the previous year. One-third of the 2007 murders were stabbings and another third were by firearm. In 2007, there were 190 stabbings and 188 shootings. Handguns were used in two-thirds of all firearm murders."
So, really hard to say if "blunt force trauma" is most of the remaining third, but probably is, along with strangling and eye-poking and whatnot. So it's basically one-third each to clubs/hands, knives, and guns.
OK, so how do Americans bump each other off? Googling "by weapon" got me: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004888.html
For that same 2007, it says 10,086 by gun, 1796 by cutting and stabbing, 647 by blunt object, 854 by hand, 130 arson, 1016 all other reasons.
Dividing by ten to get those numbers in Canadian proportions, your 1797 stabbings become 180, about our 190 stabbings; your blunt-object+hand becomes about 150, same neck of the woods, anyway.
Only the gun numbers are really proportionally higher. Over FIVE TIMES higher.
Not my area of expertise, or a political topic I care much about, but simple stats are easy to look up. They say that while you may denigrate the source of this statistical analysis as a "cartoon", the information appears to be quite correct and your "the same murder rate just shifts to other weapons" thesis is not supported.
The Rodney King beating was taped with a video camera you could not have fit in a shoebox. Now, of course, you can do decent video with a camera you can hide in your hand.
There are certain minima to the light-collecting-spot enforced by the laws of optics, of course, but it seems clear that the police will soon not be able to tell whether they are being video'd or just watched. Glasses? They'll look like shirt buttons. And folks who know in advance the location of the police action (say, protestors) will be able to carpet an area with cameras that are very hard to spot.
A lot of cameras will just be running all the time, pointing in four directions from every bicycle helmet and car, for use in accident investigations. Anything that happens in front of any place of business will be on the private anti-theft video cameras of the business - this is all already true, but in a decade or so, it won't be a few businesses, a few cars, a few cyclists, it'll routinely be everybody.
A certain amount of the "war on photography" is about police pushing back against people *visibly* trying to intimidate them by sticking cameras in their faces; police do NOT like to be in any position but domineering control of a volatile situation - a big part of their training - so they push back hard when pushed, challenged, mocked in any way. Obeying the law is secondary to Controlling The Situation. (I have some sympathy there; it's basic human psychology that this keeps them safer; never back down before a crowd.) But people invisibly photographing them - well, what are they going to do, arrest everybody in sight of any stop-and-frisk and demand they all be subjected to some kind of wanding that will find all six cameras about their person? Police routinely get away with high-handed, illegal behaviour with one or two people who get in their face, but there are limits.
Nope, I think its a lost cause. Anything that happens in public sight will presumably be recorded, multiple times, more or less *automatically*, in a matter of years.
Everybody regards a different kind of problem as your "busted shitter" though. Proprietary software companies regard problems that won't affect sales by much to be such. There are bugs in Excel VBA 2010 that were identified in Excel 97. Microsoft just can't be bothered; nobody is going to stop the whole corporation automatically buying MS-Office because a few VBA macro fans in accounting and engineering have to do awkward workarounds. So despite having all those piles of cash to pay people do dig in to that hard, dirty thicket of code, they don't.
There's some truth in your thesis, but mostly it is disproved by the amount of large, complex, and good FLOSS projects out there. Since they are large and complex, it is utterly certain that they contained a number of your "busted shitters" on the long road from Line 1 to being PostGIS or GIMP or Drupal. And here they are. Even that fact that some or all examples have *current* "busted shitters" proves nothing as long as there are some fixed ones in the project history.
Oh, and the old FLOSS/communism association - actually FLOSS is *worse* than communism from the point of view of somebody who imagines work-organization systems to be proof of moral value or failure. It's not "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs", it's worse. From each according to his ability to write code that others agree to commit, to everybody, everything. We'll just dump mountains of free stuff on you that you didn't even ask for and *don't* need. Talk about moral hazard that disinclines you to the virtue of doing your own work! Truly, we are horrible people.
What about the guys who can shoot people legally? Now that American citizens have officially been declared "fair game", the rest of us foreigners, (who already lived only by continued forbearance), thought you'd finally get concerned...
I wasn't tops in physics, but the lecture on Faraday cages really stuck with me - no ifs ands, or buts about how it completely separates the inside from outside electromagnetic worlds. So rather than running around pulling out batteries or modifying your phone, what's so hard about a metal phone case?
You may not need a tinfoil hat, but a tinfoil pouch may not be paranoid...
The 1541 was a *serial* communicator, which kind of wasted the possible data-transfer rates off a floppy disk itself.
I recall a review of the C64 as a machine for your kid, which offered in the unkind review comment: "For both game-playing and educational software, the slow floppy disk may test the patience of most children. In fact, it would be possible for some smaller children to actually grow up while waiting for their game to start".
"...become targets of threats, harassment and abuse..."
God God, is somebody dragging them into police stations, questioning them for hours, threatening them with 30 years in jail?
Because those actions would be threats, harassment, and abuse indeed.
...about 50 countries are estimated to have it. Sometimes called "Latent", but I prefer the "Threshold" term, it has the right connotation of stepping right up to the line and voluntarily stopping.
Nation that CAN build a bomb in months flat = Nation not to stage a major invasion of. (By the time Russia, Pakistan, or the US could marshal up forces to take on a nation of 70 million, the first bombs are coming off the line).
Nation that HAS built a bomb = target
And Iran knows it.
Understanding that doesn't involve liking or trusting them. Meanwhile this has to be the ninth time in a dozen-odd years that the "Attack Iran" nuts (after their Iraq debacle, "nuts" is the only appropriate word) have played Lucy and the Football with gullible US conservatives. The big windup, then no bomb.
That issue, in turn, has far more to do with who is allowed and who is not allowed to designate a particular location as an "Al Qaeda camp".
Q: Why are they Enemies Of The State?
A: Because they live in an Enemies Of The State location.
Q: Why is it such a location?
A: Because Enemies Of The State live there.
It never fails to amaze me how many people imagine this is some cut-and-dried obvious bit of detection, presumably with rows of tents and stacked rifles. People saw a couple of videos like that from the 90's and imagine there are still these "Al Qaeda camps" out in the desert. Currently, most drone-strike locations are somebody's family house in a village full of same. They are decreed to be targets because of the people observed going in and out.
The selection is completely unrestrained by the knowledge that any career or legal trouble will befall those who accidentally blow up the bakery.
There's a decent Wikipedia article on it. Accusing your management of allowing one of the now-classic dysfunctional management failures to grow could get some discussion going.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikonur_Cosmodrome
Note how the first sentence ends in "world's first and largest operational space launch facility".
Water is actually of very little help if you hit at more than 100 MPH. Ask the Challenger seven.
Except for 20,000 ft having weather issues of its own, your dream spaceport would be the top of Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador, 2 deg S of the equator and your first four miles up is free. Or as wikipedia puts it, the top is the furthest point on Earth from the planet's centre. I concede the thick covering of glaciers remain a technical challenge. And the status of eco-tourism mecca, a slight political one.
...like hurricanes and moistly corrosive air.
He didn't threaten to cut anything, but to make people pay by usage. Flat rates blind the market to resource consumption, usage-based fees open the market's eyes.
I'm sure Ghengis Khan had to do a lot of wrestling and so forth as a kid, but Julius Caesar, a patrician from birth, probably never had to touch one of the lowlife brutes he commanded, much less beat one up with his fists to establish his leadership.
Such a shame, really. When the world ended because of chemical and biological weapons that couldn't be stopped, flattened by nuclear wars....no, wait, none of that ever happened. Agreed, if you make a treaty that says "if you prepare for war, you'll have one immediately"...and then don't actually attack Japan when it starts building ships, then, yeah, they'll just break the treaty.
If you actually attack, on the other hand, the "Pax " situations have lasted for centuries on end.
Agree on all counts. I was very definitely speaking of nations. However, even here, you'll note that you are more *likely* to get rich inventing a new mousetrap these days, than by leading your neighbours to declare war on the suburb a mile over and attempting to take their houses and women. "Conan vs. SWAT" never became a successful comic.
Sure, except we haven't un-invented nuclear weapons, which remain kind of a trump over things like teenage mutant ninja soldiers since few mutations prevent you from being vaporized if sufficient joules are radiated into your mutant molecules.
So my treaty would be not so much ironclad (little naval joke there) as uranium-clad, involving capital cities becoming smoking holes, etc.
Already kind of here, really, The journalist I cited, Gwynne Dyer, as also passed along the joke told by military planners world-wide: "Q: What are the implications of nuclear Pakistan falling to radical jihadist revolutionaries? A: Traffic jam in the skies over Islamabad as five nuclear powers race to begin the bombing."
...note that in industrial civilization, riches accrue to those who best stimulate human ingenuity and productivity through peaceful trade and development, not to those who can enslave the most serfs, and that the entire basis of military arms races is basically a "caveman" mentality, obsolete since before WW1, really: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/09-6
The justification for arms races was, throughout the nuclear arms race, that we must beat the other team to the capability; except that *taking the lead* in that race is what guarantees the race to happen at all. None of the competitors in the nuclear arms race ever wanted to use one, or did; they understood that their use would make them a target, not a victor.
Bolstered by this realization, you could instead propose treaties, with open development of such technologies, and monitoring of capabilities with the spectre of a ruinously expensive and dangerous race beginning if security around secret weapons development *ever* slips.
Nah. Never happen. Too much money involved.
Some of the things brought to light by the release are not just "morally wrong" in one 22-year-old's opinion, they're clearly unlawful. The UCMJ is pretty specific that not only do you have no requirement to go along with criminal orders, you have a responsibility to see the crime addressed.
When you are talking about crimes of the most pervasive sort, where support for committing them runs through the whole organization, "addressed" is clearly not going to happen with a report to the Lt 2nd Class you probably report to.
Face it: we'd never have heard of these crimes without Manning's actions. That we have heard of these crimes is a social good. There's just no getting around that.
If the results show that the harm done TO THE PUBLIC (not to some military or civilian employees who have been embarrassed) is small - and the Pentagon is clear in saying nobody was killed or injured from the released, the diplomatic fallout has been very minor - and the good done for the public is large, then any law that penalizes this action heavily is clearly not in the best interests of the public.
I think the content industries have a perfect streak going: they always oppose technologies that turn out to be, not only not harmful, but actively good for their bottom line.
Radio was going to ruin record sales. A few decades after they lost that one, they were shelling out payola to get on the air.
The cassette tape recorder was going to destroy records. After losing that one, they made a mint selling everybody the same record twice, the new version being portable.
VCRs were going to be to the movie industry what the Boston Strangler was to women; after the Betamax decision, they made money selling cassettes.
The lesson is, that when content industries oppose a new technology, they have to be beaten ... for their OWN good....
Is the reduction not even 40% ? I'd thought it was 50% because gas turbines were also more efficient or something.
Anyway, the poster is skipping that you can't really get gas out of the ground and to the plant without a few percent loss. And since methane has 20X the infrared "X-section" of CO2, every percent lost harms the atmosphere as much as 20% of the coal effect. So 2% methane + 60% of the CO2 = Just as Bad As Coal.
I remember the same thing said about nuclear rocket ships, now that we have conquered the atom....in 1950...
Please skip all the unions-are-evil vs owners-are-evil arguments. They're irrelevant.
Unions work -and are generally necessary - when everybody does the same thing. If everybody is an interchangeable part of (typically) an assembly line or repetitive job like resource extraction, then anybody can be replaced, and people get treated like machines. And unions can strike for compensation and conditions that are the same - or at least, based on the same formula - for all those doing comparable work.
But while large bureaucracies invariably attempt to bring in assembly-line "development methodologies", development just isn't coal-mining. There's a much larger dynamic range in the amount of (good, productive) code a developer can produce in a day vs the amount of coal you can mine, so narrow pay ranges are inappropriate. And developers are not so interchangeable - a good one threatening to quit gets more than a shrug from the boss.
What you need is not a union, but a pressure group aimed at shutting down H-1B abuses. That's quite a straightforward goal.