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User: vakuona

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  1. I disagree.

    Deflation is terrible. Deflation means you can take money, put it under a mattress and have it worth more years down the line. That is a terrible idea for many reasons' not least that it discourages spending or even investment.

    It discourages spending now because you will get more for your money later.

    It discourages investing because it allows you to increase your wealth without risk taking.

    Risk taking is key to economic activity. Yes, some ventures will be loss making, but in aggregate, investment is broadly a positive. If there was certainty of a positive return, then investors wouldn't need to be rewarded by high returns at all.

  2. Lack of inflation is a bug, not a feature.

    It costs money to maintain a monetary system. Why should this be a free service?

    Also, why should economic activity that took place in the far past have the same "value" years later? Hoarding currency is not an economically neutral activity. Inflation "punishes" this in a fairly predictable and largely fair way.

  3. If only 2% of malpractice suits result in a payoff for the plaintiff, then there is a lot of money possibly being spent and added to healthcare costs unnecessarily.

    So doctors have to have insurance to ensure that malpractice suit don't bankrupt them.

  4. Re:Social media is only amplification on Former Facebook Exec Says Social Media is Ripping Apart Society (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Not just exposure to different ideas. Exposure to and interacting with people with those different ideas helps.

    Currently, tolerance just means "leave those weirdos you disagree with alone" rather than, "hey, here are some weirdos who are actually good people. You might find you actually like them".

  5. Re:San Bernadino all over again on Apple Is Served A Search Warrant To Unlock Texas Church Gunman's iPhone (nydailynews.com) · · Score: 1

    So, what you're saying is that someone carrying a gun is more likely to end up shot or dead?

    No, what I am saying is that criminals are likely to end up shot or dead.

  6. Re:San Bernadino all over again on Apple Is Served A Search Warrant To Unlock Texas Church Gunman's iPhone (nydailynews.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sigh. Correlation is not causation.

    This observation is probably due to the fact that criminals (drug dealers, robbers etc) are more likely to end up shot or dead, and since they are likely to be carrying guns, wind up in the "people carrying guns" column who wind up dead by firearm.

    So it is not the act of carrying a gun that makes them more likely to be killed, but the fact that they are carrying out crimes (while carrying guns) that makes them more likely to be killed.

  7. Re:Climate Change: the debate continues on NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    You have posted no facts.

    1 million dead from Chernobyl is a bare faced lie.

  8. Re:If it's only 250 MPH, it won't be fastest. on Tesla Unveils 500-Mile Range Semi Truck, 620-Mile Range Roadster 2.0 · · Score: 2

    I think the point is that it can accelerate like mad, not that it needs to. This is demonstrating that it is technically superior in almost every way.

    Therefore, it should nearly always be running well within its performance envelope, which I imagine has benefits in terms of longevity of the components etc.

  9. Re: How do they figure it's cheaper than Rail on Tesla Unveils 500-Mile Range Semi Truck, 620-Mile Range Roadster 2.0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Not so much in the US. Very little rail freight in the USA is electric from what I understand.

  10. Re: Good and bad on Apology After Japanese Train Departs 20 Seconds Early (bbc.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not quite. There are two good reasons why trains need to run on time in Japan.

    1 - They are so many of them that small delays can snowball into major delays across the network.

    2 - Trains leaving early is bad because you make people who are on time miss their train, and then make them late.

  11. Re:Climate Change: the debate continues on NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    WHO most certainly does not assume more than 1 million dead. The last number WHO published was an estimate of 4,000 eventual deaths. Your remaining 1 million deaths are essentially made up.

    Greenpeace are very unreliable when it comes to facts.

    "Google yourself" is basically you admitting you don't have facts.

  12. Re:Climate Change: the debate continues on NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    Your numbers are really fantastical! As someone else already pointed out, Chernobyl happened 31 years ago, so for people who now be 45 to have been involved in the cleanup operation, they would have been 14 at the time.

    In any case, I would generally expect more than a third of people who were alive to now be dead, so just saying x number out of y are now dead is essentially meaningless. You need to talk about excess mortality - i.e. remove the baseline. And it must be radiation related.

    Anyway, what are your sources?

  13. Re:Climate Change: the debate continues on NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    Sources?

    Here is mine:

    http://www.who.int/mediacentre...

    Now, as of 2005, only 50 deaths were directly attributable. So you need to find another million deaths less 50.

    Everything else out there is an estimate of the number of future deaths, and there is none that is credible that I have seen that goes beyond 50,000 eventual early deaths (everyone eventually dies though).

  14. Re:Climate Change: the debate continues on NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    Chernobyl killed a million. In an area that is not even densely populated.

    This is a lie. Chernobyl did not kill a million people. The only people peddling numbers anywhere near that are anti-nuclear groups.

    Less than 100 deaths are directly attributable to Chernobyl.

  15. Re:Climate Change: the debate continues on NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    From https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

    "In England, there were 163 wind turbine accidents that killed 14 people in 2011. Wind produced about 15 billion kWhrs that year, so using a capacity factor of 25%, that translates to about 1,000 deaths per trillion kWhrs produced (the world produces 15 trillion kWhrs per year from all sources)."

    and

    "We in the United States actually care more about this kind of thing than most other countries, so our numbers are the lowest in the world. The global averages in energy-related deaths are significantly higher than in America, with coal at 100,000 deaths per trillion kWhrs (China is the worst), natural gas at 4,000 deaths, biomass at 24,000, solar at 440, and wind at 150. Using the worst-case scenarios from Chernobyl and Fukushima brings nuclear up to a whopping 90 deaths per trillion kWhrs produced, still the lowest of any energy source."

  16. Re:Climate Change: the debate continues on NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    A nuclear power plant failure does not potentially kill millions. It just doesn't! Very few large weapons even have that much power.

  17. Re:Climate Change: the debate continues on NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    More people are killed fitting solar panels and installing / maintaining wind turbines than are killed by nuclear power plant failures every year.

  18. Re:Climate Change: the debate continues on NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below (newsweek.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The nuclear cost problem is a regulatory problem.

    If BMW had to design a car from scratch every time they built one, each one would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

    Same goes with nuclear. We don't build enough of them, so we don't become more skilled at doing it. So we over-engineer.

    We should be designing a nuclear power plant, and building hundreds of identical ones in exactly the same way.

    We should also encourage smaller, rather than larger and more expensive power plants. One can build smaller reactors on a production line rather than have to build them on site. This will drive down costs.

    It is so hard to build nuclear plants that we can't create a production line of them in reality, and anyone who gets permission to build one wants to build the biggest they can, because that permission is hard to get.

  19. Re:That title (of original article) is not accurat on The US Government Keeps Spectacularly Underestimating Solar Energy Installation (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    Maybe that is the problem with needing a policy in which government effectively bets blind on one technology or the other. Government has to be cautious, and has to bet on technology that is mature enough that they can predict its growth accurately. That puts any truly groundbreaking innovation outside of anything government would consider.

  20. Disposable personal authentication devices on Why Are We Still Using Passwords? (securityledger.com) · · Score: 1

    Here is a thought. How about multipurpose disposable personal authentication devices.

    Think of TouchID. They key thing about TouchID is that the biometric authentication is "on device". So if you decoupled the TouchID from the iPhone, and developed a token that could use generate a one time passphrase that you use to login to any website, that would mean an attacker needs physical proximity to you to steal your logins. Goodbye Russian hackers.

    Single point of failure yes, but also single point of hardening.

  21. Re:GPL is about user freedom on Friendlier GPL-Enforcement Permission Proposed By Linux Kernel Developers (kroah.com) · · Score: 1

    Both largely give you the same rights over software already licensed under the terms of those licenses. They key difference is that the GPL gives you additional rights over any modifications made to the software provided those modifications have been distributed to anyone else.

    You cannot take away rights to software with BSD license. You can only not give rights to modification of software that is licensed, and that is a reasonable compromise.

  22. Re:Give up anonymity if it saves just one life on Why Are We Still Using Passwords? (securityledger.com) · · Score: 0

    And we shall call this chip/mark/tattoo "the mark of the beast"!

  23. Re:Say what? on Why China is Winning the Clean Energy Race (axios.com) · · Score: 1

    I was only discussing PV subsidies.

    Of course subsidies should be removed if they are no longer necessary. The fact that PV is now so cheap that companies will deploy it anyway kind of proves this.

    The fact that Hinckley Point C might still require subsidies may actually be evidence that the subsidy is necessary.

    Subsidies are not supposed to be for government to reward technologies they like. They are supposed to be to help projects considered to be good, but are otherwise not viable to be undertaken. Perhaps Hinckley Point C fits that description, but solar PV no longer does.

  24. Re:Say what? on Why China is Winning the Clean Energy Race (axios.com) · · Score: 2

    Chinese PV prices are falling so fast in markets that don't use tariff proctectionism it's threatening traditional energy companies. Here in the UK our idiot gov are trying really hard to kill PV by premature subsidy removal and failing to outrun the price drops. In the US you as usual let the incumbent energy companies lobby and sue PV out of many states even before Trump declared war.

    If removal of subsidies is failing to outrun price drops, doesn't this prove that the subsidies are no longer necessary, and should therefore be removed?

  25. Re:Well, except for the "touchscreen phone" thing. on Android Always Beats the iPhone To New Features, Qualcomm Says (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    You are wrong. All iPods ever made played mp3s.