after a breeding program is established so you don't need to constantly refine more fuel.
Refining fuel from ore is far cheaper than breeding fuel. Breeder reactors cost more to run, not less. France uses breeders, and their cost of electric power is about $0.20/kWh compared to about $0.08 in America.
This is demonstrably and obviously much cheaper than constantly mining coal
This is the dumbest thing I have read so far today. Nukes have historically been about twice the cost of coal. If they were "obviously" cheaper, they wouldn't require subsidies, and they would have replaced coal plants long ago.
The higher costs of nuclear are entirely the result of safety regulations
Right. After Fukushima Daichi, all we have to do is convince the public that nukes are too safe and we need to start cutting corners.
Lets just subsidize it at half the level that we are for solar and wind on a construction cost and per mwh basis.
The justification for the wind & solar subsidies is that they are only temporary support while the technology matures. So far, this has more or less worked, as both wind and solar have become far more efficient and cost effective.
With nuclear, there is no such justification. Nuclear is not getting more cost effective. It is getting worse. Building and running a nuclear plant today is way more expensive than it was 50 years ago.
settling on a proven design and mass producing them.
That is exactly what the EPR was designed to do. It is being used for the Hinkley Point Reactor, and is expected to generate electricity for double the cost of the UK's already outrageously expensive power.
So maybe a standard design isn't a magic bullet after all. If nuclear power economics could really be fixed by a minor tweak, we would have done it long ago.
Then it will fail. Nuclear cannot compete directly with shale gas. No way. Not even close. If we want carbon free electricity from nuclear, then we have to either subsidize it or start taxing carbon emissions.
there's pressure to generate lots of publications rather than do good work.
True, but this is only part of the problem. There is also a huge problem of researchers producing trivial results (whether shoddy or not) because they are afraid to ask the big questions and pursue revolutionary results. If they go long, and fail, their career may be over since nobody publishes negative results. If they fake successful results, they will draw intense scrutiny and be exposed. So they play it safe and do research that nobody cares about.
Top tier publications like Science and Nature have some good papers. But if you go to the 2nd and 3rd tier publications, the research is mostly meaningless garbage. It doesn't matter if the results are bogus, because nobody cares about the results in the first place.
Couldn't have anything to do with short term outlook by poor management in companies?
Very few companies do any published research. This is about academia and government funded labs that seek grants, not industry.
The "short term outlook" in companies actually improves the situation, because it puts pressure on researchers to come up with real results that can be put into products, rather than bogus research papers.
Did you know that most "Nigerian" spam doesn't actually come from Nigeria?
Here is an article that explains the strategy of making spam look like obvious spam. Not only do spammers explicitly mention Nigeria, they also intentionally use bad spelling and bizarre capitalization. All this is designed to weed out sensible people, so they can focus their efforts on only the most credulous respondents.
The spam isn't coming from either candidate's team. They're phishing attacks.
... and the reason they mention Trump is as a dumbness filter.
Did you know that most "Nigerian" spam doesn't actually come from Nigeria? The reason the spammers mention Nigeria is to make it so obvious that it is fraud that only the stupidest of the stupid respond. If they sucker in someone with half a brain, then it is likely that person will eventually suspect something and balk at wiring the money, thus wasting their time. So they only want people with no sense at all.
Trump supporters have already shown themselves to be easily conned, and incapable of rational thinking, so they should be relatively easy marks for scammers.
the executives and any managers who were behind this negligence need to spend some serious time in prison.
This reminds me of the old adage: "We build prisons for people we are afraid of, and then we fill them up with people we are mad at".
Prisons are to segregate people that are physically dangerous from civilized society. For other people, there are always better alternatives. For instance, Marissa could spend the next 5 years changing bedpans in hospitals while wearing an ankle bracelet.
America imprisons far more people per capita than other countries. Far more than Russia, four times as many as China, 15 times more than Japan. There is little evidence that this leads to less crime, and plenty of evidence that by disrupting families it increases crime.
Come on, ledgers are never edited, correction transactions are written when a mistake happens.
Ledgers are "corrected" all the time. In theory, that should never happen, but there are plenty of ways to fudge. Some accounting systems, including Quickbooks, have an "owner" mode that allows anyone with a special password to modify and backdate transactions. This is one reason Quickbooks is so popular.
Another possibility is to restore from backup, and re-enter the transactions, leaving out or modifying the troublesome entry. If the software doesn't allow you to enter an arbitrary date, then just set the system date & time between transactions as you enter them. You can download scripts to automate this.
And, of course, there is the classic solution of keeping two sets of books: one ledger for internal accounting, and a separate ledger for the tax man.
Sweden has high taxes by American standards, but by many measures they are otherwise even more capitalist than America. Their post office is privatized, as is a big fraction of their educational system. It is very easy to start a business, and while regulations are strict, they are also streamlined and the bureaucracy is fast and efficient. Sweden ranks 8th out of 185 countries on the Ease of doing business index. America is only one notch higher.
That is, of course, if you have the skill needed to perform the actual work
For most repairs, no skill is needed. Just go to Youtube, type in the product you are repairing, and a short description of what the problem is, and you will get a dozen videos showing exactly how to fix it.
I wonder if EU commission will let that happen without complaining it violates EU's crazy free market rules
That depends on how it is implemented. If there is a requirement that the repairperson is local to Sweden, then that would violate EU rules, and can, and should be, banned. But if a Swede can drive to Finland or Denmark to have the repair done, and still get the tax break, then it should be okay.
Somebody is making that extra money, but so many times it's not the person doing the actual work.
Go to Craigslist and hire someone direct. Or go to nextdoor.com and ask your neighbors for a recommendation. If someone does a good job, give them a good review on Yelp. Spread the word.
I don't know a single person who hasn't been screwed around by lazy or inept UPS drivers.
My company often had problems with damaged packages, so we installed a security camera by our loading dock. It recorded the UPS driver throwing packages out of the back of the truck, The top of the arc was about 10 feet high, before they came crashing to the ground. The contents were destroyed, and UPS paid several thousand dollars for all the damages... but the driver kept his job.
He never tossed our packages like that again, but he would often look up at the camera and scowl.
Each has strict DoD based password criteria including expiring every 60 days, no repeats, etc.
The way that I deal with idiotic requirements like this is to append a four digit date in MMYY format to the end of the PW, and just update to the current date. So if I am required to update a PW this month, the new PW will be correcthorsebatterystaple0916.
I always use "correcthorsebatterystaple" for the base of the PW because I have heard that is an extremely secure PW.
The reason that Amazon is an exception is that they are actually investing for the long run. Most unprofitable companies are not investing, they are just losing money through mismanagement and using "we are investing for the long term" as an excuse. So of course investors don't tolerate that.
There are plenty of growth funds that specialize in companies focused on growth rather than short-term profit. If there was really a lack of long term investing, these funds would out-perform the market. For the most part, they don't.
If you ignore HFTers (which are neither long nor short term investors) the average hold time for stocks has been going up for more than a decade.
it would appear amazon has a monopoly in this online retail market.
I am a happy Amazon customer, and I feel a lack of outrage over this photo storage change, but if you are looking for an alternative online retailer there is Jet.com which offers a similar range of products at comparable prices.
Amazon has made a deliberate decision to focus on growth rather than profit. So far this has been a very smart strategy, and their investors seem to agree.
Amazon is an obvious counter-example to the claim that American investors only focus on short term results.
Slashdot Mirror
after a breeding program is established so you don't need to constantly refine more fuel.
Refining fuel from ore is far cheaper than breeding fuel. Breeder reactors cost more to run, not less. France uses breeders, and their cost of electric power is about $0.20/kWh compared to about $0.08 in America.
This is demonstrably and obviously much cheaper than constantly mining coal
This is the dumbest thing I have read so far today. Nukes have historically been about twice the cost of coal. If they were "obviously" cheaper, they wouldn't require subsidies, and they would have replaced coal plants long ago.
The higher costs of nuclear are entirely the result of safety regulations
Right. After Fukushima Daichi, all we have to do is convince the public that nukes are too safe and we need to start cutting corners.
Lets just subsidize it at half the level that we are for solar and wind on a construction cost and per mwh basis.
The justification for the wind & solar subsidies is that they are only temporary support while the technology matures. So far, this has more or less worked, as both wind and solar have become far more efficient and cost effective.
With nuclear, there is no such justification. Nuclear is not getting more cost effective. It is getting worse. Building and running a nuclear plant today is way more expensive than it was 50 years ago.
settling on a proven design and mass producing them.
That is exactly what the EPR was designed to do. It is being used for the Hinkley Point Reactor, and is expected to generate electricity for double the cost of the UK's already outrageously expensive power.
So maybe a standard design isn't a magic bullet after all. If nuclear power economics could really be fixed by a minor tweak, we would have done it long ago.
Make it public run
Like Chernobyl?
Let it succeed or fail on it's own merits.
Then it will fail. Nuclear cannot compete directly with shale gas. No way. Not even close. If we want carbon free electricity from nuclear, then we have to either subsidize it or start taxing carbon emissions.
there's pressure to generate lots of publications rather than do good work.
True, but this is only part of the problem. There is also a huge problem of researchers producing trivial results (whether shoddy or not) because they are afraid to ask the big questions and pursue revolutionary results. If they go long, and fail, their career may be over since nobody publishes negative results. If they fake successful results, they will draw intense scrutiny and be exposed. So they play it safe and do research that nobody cares about.
Top tier publications like Science and Nature have some good papers. But if you go to the 2nd and 3rd tier publications, the research is mostly meaningless garbage. It doesn't matter if the results are bogus, because nobody cares about the results in the first place.
Couldn't have anything to do with short term outlook by poor management in companies?
Very few companies do any published research. This is about academia and government funded labs that seek grants, not industry.
The "short term outlook" in companies actually improves the situation, because it puts pressure on researchers to come up with real results that can be put into products, rather than bogus research papers.
Did you know that most "Nigerian" spam doesn't actually come from Nigeria?
Here is an article that explains the strategy of making spam look like obvious spam. Not only do spammers explicitly mention Nigeria, they also intentionally use bad spelling and bizarre capitalization. All this is designed to weed out sensible people, so they can focus their efforts on only the most credulous respondents.
For spammers, "Trump" is the new Nigeria.
The spam isn't coming from either candidate's team. They're phishing attacks.
... and the reason they mention Trump is as a dumbness filter.
Did you know that most "Nigerian" spam doesn't actually come from Nigeria? The reason the spammers mention Nigeria is to make it so obvious that it is fraud that only the stupidest of the stupid respond. If they sucker in someone with half a brain, then it is likely that person will eventually suspect something and balk at wiring the money, thus wasting their time. So they only want people with no sense at all.
Trump supporters have already shown themselves to be easily conned, and incapable of rational thinking, so they should be relatively easy marks for scammers.
the executives and any managers who were behind this negligence need to spend some serious time in prison.
This reminds me of the old adage: "We build prisons for people we are afraid of, and then we fill them up with people we are mad at".
Prisons are to segregate people that are physically dangerous from civilized society. For other people, there are always better alternatives. For instance, Marissa could spend the next 5 years changing bedpans in hospitals while wearing an ankle bracelet.
America imprisons far more people per capita than other countries. Far more than Russia, four times as many as China, 15 times more than Japan. There is little evidence that this leads to less crime, and plenty of evidence that by disrupting families it increases crime.
Come on, ledgers are never edited, correction transactions are written when a mistake happens.
Ledgers are "corrected" all the time. In theory, that should never happen, but there are plenty of ways to fudge. Some accounting systems, including Quickbooks, have an "owner" mode that allows anyone with a special password to modify and backdate transactions. This is one reason Quickbooks is so popular.
Another possibility is to restore from backup, and re-enter the transactions, leaving out or modifying the troublesome entry. If the software doesn't allow you to enter an arbitrary date, then just set the system date & time between transactions as you enter them. You can download scripts to automate this.
And, of course, there is the classic solution of keeping two sets of books: one ledger for internal accounting, and a separate ledger for the tax man.
This is the retarded, short-video version of Google Glass.
Google Glass could only record for a few seconds as well.
Sweden?!?! Tax cut?!?!?
Sweden has high taxes by American standards, but by many measures they are otherwise even more capitalist than America. Their post office is privatized, as is a big fraction of their educational system. It is very easy to start a business, and while regulations are strict, they are also streamlined and the bureaucracy is fast and efficient. Sweden ranks 8th out of 185 countries on the Ease of doing business index. America is only one notch higher.
That is, of course, if you have the skill needed to perform the actual work
For most repairs, no skill is needed. Just go to Youtube, type in the product you are repairing, and a short description of what the problem is, and you will get a dozen videos showing exactly how to fix it.
I wonder if EU commission will let that happen without complaining it violates EU's crazy free market rules
That depends on how it is implemented. If there is a requirement that the repairperson is local to Sweden, then that would violate EU rules, and can, and should be, banned. But if a Swede can drive to Finland or Denmark to have the repair done, and still get the tax break, then it should be okay.
Somebody is making that extra money, but so many times it's not the person doing the actual work.
Go to Craigslist and hire someone direct. Or go to nextdoor.com and ask your neighbors for a recommendation. If someone does a good job, give them a good review on Yelp. Spread the word.
UPS is union so will they let this get far?
If they start obstructing, UPS management will respond by rolling the drones out even faster.
The longshoreman's union couldn't stop containerization, and the Teamsters will not stop the drones.
I don't know a single person who hasn't been screwed around by lazy or inept UPS drivers.
My company often had problems with damaged packages, so we installed a security camera by our loading dock. It recorded the UPS driver throwing packages out of the back of the truck, The top of the arc was about 10 feet high, before they came crashing to the ground. The contents were destroyed, and UPS paid several thousand dollars for all the damages ... but the driver kept his job.
He never tossed our packages like that again, but he would often look up at the camera and scowl.
I wonder how long before we start seeing drones take the place of police in cars.
You mean like this, this, and this?
Each has strict DoD based password criteria including expiring every 60 days, no repeats, etc.
The way that I deal with idiotic requirements like this is to append a four digit date in MMYY format to the end of the PW, and just update to the current date. So if I am required to update a PW this month, the new PW will be correcthorsebatterystaple0916.
I always use "correcthorsebatterystaple" for the base of the PW because I have heard that is an extremely secure PW.
The reason that Amazon is an exception is that they are actually investing for the long run. Most unprofitable companies are not investing, they are just losing money through mismanagement and using "we are investing for the long term" as an excuse. So of course investors don't tolerate that.
There are plenty of growth funds that specialize in companies focused on growth rather than short-term profit. If there was really a lack of long term investing, these funds would out-perform the market. For the most part, they don't.
If you ignore HFTers (which are neither long nor short term investors) the average hold time for stocks has been going up for more than a decade.
it would appear amazon has a monopoly in this online retail market.
I am a happy Amazon customer, and I feel a lack of outrage over this photo storage change, but if you are looking for an alternative online retailer there is Jet.com which offers a similar range of products at comparable prices.
Amazon struggles to make a profit.
Amazon has made a deliberate decision to focus on growth rather than profit. So far this has been a very smart strategy, and their investors seem to agree.
Amazon is an obvious counter-example to the claim that American investors only focus on short term results.
America has a nuclear attack submarine named the USS Corpus Christi, which means "body of Christ". What would Jesus think about that?