Please note - I am not stating how things should be, I am merely stating how they are.
The undeniable fact of the matter is that these laws remain in effect because people are unwilling to oppose them, if doing so means defending bigots. I assume you do not disagree with my assessment?
I am not saying this is morally right, and in point of fact I see this as a bad thing. Were I a criminal defence lawyer living in the UK, I would seriously consider taking their case as a matter of principle (I am none of those things, but we're talking hypothetically). The fact I find the defendants despicable does not mean I think they deserve to be prosecuted for it.
So using phrases like "if you actually believe" implies that you missed the point. What I believe is right is immaterial to a discussion about what is actually happening.
(I'm replying to your post, since you're logged in, but this reply applies to the ACs above you as well).
The convicted parties were handing out leaflets in the UK, which drew complaints due to their racist content. The content of the leaflets was stored on a US server, but "published" (printed really) in the UK. Both defendants lived in the UK, but sought asylum in the US after they were charged.
Jurisdiction is not the problem here - in every country I know of, storing "illegal material" outside the local borders does not constitute a legal defence. If we were talking about weapons or drugs, then storing internationally (say in a safe haven where they're legal) while distributing locally (where they're illegal) would still get you charged.
The question is whether the material should be illegal in the first place. That has nothing to do with jurisdiction and everything to do with civil liberties.
"Hate crime" is a blanket term for laws that regulate speech with the intent of suppressing racism. More recently this has expanded to include homophobia. How those laws are viewed largely depends on whether the viewer feels more strongly about bigotry or censorship; whether you see a greater evil in suppression of speech or unreasoning hatred.
I'd call censorship the greater evil, but despite that I'm ambivalent about this particular case. On the one hand, I do not think such a law ought to exist at all, on the other hand, I just can't muster any outrage at a neo-Nazi getting jailed. I suspect that it's cases like this that allow such laws to remain in effect - try to oppose the law on principle and you'll find yourself in the position of having to defend the bigots, something that even those most committed to free speech find repellent.
I'd say Portal was also fairly funny, even if the memes it sprouted have started to wear out their welcome.
And I can think of dozens of RPGs, old and recent, that had their funny moments. Though in those cases they tended to be serious games with the occasional comic relief.
I think TFA is expecting games that are purely comedic, i.e. in the same vein as Monkey Island, and those never were that common. All the classic games that fit that bill are either adventure games, which don't get made anymore, or aimed mainly at a young audience. Pure comedy written for adults (and no, that doesn't mean "mature" in the sense of inappropriate for kids) is a niche that's largely empty, but what we have instead in abundance is non-comedic games that don't take themselves too seriously.
I absolutely agree that what he said is not only true but very well stated. What I meant was he's crazy if he thinks he's going to educate all/. readers with anything short of an infinite series of posts
"Sanity is much like virginity. Once lost, it never really bothers you again.":-P
(Just so we're clear, the exasperation in my initial post was somewhat overstated. If I ever truly got tired of explaining things, I suspect boredom would follow soon after.)
Ugh. I get tired of having to explain this. You'd think it'd stick the first dozen times or so, and I wouldn't have to keep repeating myself.
The CO2 from your breath is not the problem. The CO2 from your tailpipe is.
The reason is their source. Carbon from food is ultimately bound via photosynthesis; you either eat the plants or eat the animals that eat the plants. Photosynthesis removes free CO2 from the air and binds the carbon, releasing the oxygen. Any high school student can tell you this.
Every last ounce of CO2 coming out of your mouth, right now as you're reading this, was previously bound up as food, which was living tissue once, which (directly or indirectly) grew via taking CO2 out of the air. It's a closed cycle. Exhaling more CO2 will not result in a net increase in the carbon cycle.
Your tailpipe is different. The hydrocarbons you're burning come from fossil fuels, which have been sequestered from the atmosphere for the past few million years. Burning them does add a net amount of CO2 to the carbon cycle.
Climate change is not about what's in the air, it's about what's no longer in the ground. This is why Biofuels are a solution - the IC engine can be totally identical to one running on fossil fuels, but the hydrocarbons are grown rather than mined.
Again, over 50% of laws in the UK are rubber-stamping EU regulations: many of those pushed through the EU by current or failed British socialist politcos who could never have got the same laws through in the UK. How will writing to a Labour MP change that?
By getting them not to rubber stamp it?
Given the amount of opposition I remember the UK having toward the EU, it seems to me that this should be the easier part. Granted, much of that opposition is no more, but the sentiment of remaining apart from continental affairs has a long, deeply rooted history.
As far as that goes, the EU itself can be changed. The problem in that case is not strictly limited to the UK, but if enough people in Europe want change to happen, it will. See previous about the problem of getting enough people pointed in the same direction.
22% of voters voted for the Labour party, but they won anyway. Where do you get the idea that people support the current state of affairs?
Did I say the majority supported the current state of affairs? I did not.
All it takes is enough of the people supporting the current state, and enough of the rest not caring, for things to remain as is. That can be 22%. It can also be 5%. It all depends on the particulars.
If anything, this fact should offer you some encouragement. You don't need to rally 51% of the population to effect change in the government.
Britain is simply broken: the only way to change it is civil war or catastrophic collapse. The smart people are getting out before they require exit visas.
This is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If everyone who sees the erosion of civil liberties as a bad thing gives up and gets out, then it really will come down to a revolution as the only solution. And who's to say that their new home won't suffer the same downfall ten, twenty or fifty years from now?
(Disclaimer: I am not the GP, nor am I precisely "libertarian".)
Please, explain exactly why the police watching you & everyone else all the time in public is bad. What, exactly, is the problem there?
To my way of thinking, the question is backwards. It should not be up to me to show them why their system is a problem, it should be up to them to show why it is necessary.
I'll agree that you give up some privacy in a public place. That's common sense. But I see a difference between that and having your every move in public recorded.
You're falling into the trap of assuming that a political party is an entity in its own right, instead of an abstraction. Rip open the heart of a party, and what falls out? People.
Either change the views of the people who hold the power, or replace them with others, and the situation changes. I'm not going to suggest this is easy, but I am going to suggest that if the constituents of a given Labour MP started flooding his or her office with letters pushing for change, it'd be a step in the right direction.
This does get us to the larger problems, which are apathy and support for the current state of affairs. If the current crop of politicians didn't have popular support for what they were doing, they'd be out of a job. So part of what needs to happen is getting through to enough of the people who either want the current government or don't care either way.
Where there is great freedom for you, there is great freedom for others to take advantage of you.
It doesn't have to be that way.
Real life governance is not some sliding scale where total anarchy is one end and Orwellian tyranny is the other. Is any social question so one dimensional? Thinking that way boxes you in, because it starts to look like a damned if you do, damned if you don't, scenario. You begin to accept corruption, because the anarchy scares you, or you embrace anarchy, because you don't see any alternative to getting rid of tyranny.
To give you a depressing example of why this line of thinking fails, consider this. A government can be corrupt, tyrannical and totally ineffectual, all at once, such as to leave a country in a state whereby the citizenry have no freedom, and no safety. That doesn't fit anywhere into the worldview that holds anarchy and tyranny as logically opposite extremes, because, hey, you have both. Usually this comes about when a corrupt government is in a state of strife or internal warfare, while still aspiring to ironclad rule - think Afghanistan.
The reverse is also true. An accountable government with limited, but not nonexistent, power, can run a country without falling into the pitfalls above. It must be democratic, it must be as transparent as possible, and it must have a strong judiciary backed by laws that include some sort of bill of rights or equivalent document above all others. Checks and balances are the key. Cleaning out corruption when it occurs is also vital, and failure to do so is usually what trips the whole system up.
The problem is, and always has been, that maintaining good government is a lot of work. Bad government is the default setting when it is not fought against.
While I understand where you're coming from, I strongly disagree. The existence of tyranny abroad does not excuse the erosion of liberty at home. Hell, forget Iran, I could think of a dozen far worse places to live without thinking hard, and yet I still see the point of the person who posted the article.
Simply put, the attitude you're expressing, namely "it's much worse over there, so why are you complaining?" is a common one, and very problematic. How is a person in a country that is relatively free, but headed in the wrong direction, supposed to agitate for change in that worldview? There is, after all, always someplace worse.
We, in the rich, safe, peaceful developed world, should aspire to do much better than Iran. We ought to make ourselves a bastion for civil liberties, human rights and responsible self-governance. Iran has a bad situation made worse by factors beyond the control of the average citizen; we have no such excuse.
That being said, my suggestion to the person who posted this article is the improve the local situation instead of fleeing from it. If you are among those who see the current trend as a step in the wrong direction, then fight it. If enough people did that, the situation would change. It's getting enough people to realize this that poses a problem.
The question should not be about solar farms. A solar farm is commercial. TFA is an example of a guy who's done this residentially. Bit of a difference there.
A homeowner can afford to make improvements that will not pay off for ten years, provided he has the capital to invest in his house, and plans on living there that long. In this case, the green angle gave him an incentive to go in that direction - a non-financial reason, but a responsible one nonetheless. Given declining costs for solar panels, and rising costs for electricity, this will likely become more common in the next decade.
You asked why commercial farms often use wind instead of solar. Commercial solar power generally doesn't use photoelectric panels, for reasons of price and output. A more effective design would be an array of mirrors focused on a heat engine (Stirling maybe, though it doesn't have to be) connected to a dynamo. That's a little complex for residential use, but more cost effective if the goal is centralized power generation.
The problem is that commercial solar generators are not as cost effective for energy farming in most locations. There are exceptions, mostly places where sunlight is abundant, but you also need a market to sell the power too if you're working commercially. Nevada would be an excellent place to build one (no idea if any such system has ever been proposed there).
Wind farms fare slightly better in terms of the cost to build the windmill. Also, many locations that are well suited for wind farms are much less suited for solar farms, owing to the fact the climate favours the former, but not the latter.
The thing is a part of the house now, and the entire house will continue to appreciate. As people become more interested in solar, a house with solar already in place will appreciate faster.
I could, I suppose, argue that he's getting the same depreciation that every early adopter gets. Cutting edge tech that cost's 38 grand today will cost much less in a decade, assuming the price continues to decline for photoelectric panels. Not to mention that retrofitting a house to be solar is probably a good deal less efficient, and more expensive, than building it solar from the ground up. So his resale is going to be competing with cheaper solar homes that were either refitted later, using lower cost materials of the same quality, or built with the equipment designed in.
But I'm playing the devils advocate - that's not a position I myself agree with. The way I see it, being an early adopter in this case means getting a head start on energy savings. Five years ahead of the game means five years less payments to the power company. And someone's gotta break trail and show that it can be done to make way for the mass market version of the technology - that's the benefit early adopters bring to late adopters.
That's very much true for inertial confinement fusion, which uses the pulse model you describe. In those systems, ignition is akin to spark plugs for an IC engine - one spark, one mass of fuel ignited, repeat.
Magnetic fusion systems like ITER however are meant to use the heat of fusion to sustain ignition. This is probably going to be the more efficient approach, since it means not having to scrape together the energy for ignition repeatedly - start it up, and it'll keep going as long as you put fuel in and retain confinement (neither of which is easy yet). Given the current energy needed for ignition, the magnetic model will likely become net-positive sooner than the inertial model, though I'd obviously invest in research for both were I in charge of such matters.
Also, outside of naval vessels, I'm not sure any vehicle is going to use fusion directly, at least not in any near-future time span, so power-to-weight isn't going to be a concern. For futuristic spacecraft propulsion, inertial confinement would be my pick, particularly if it works for nuclear pulse propulsion.
I was under the impression that ITER was effectively the prelude to full scale fusion, and it was effectively just a scale up from previous designs to see if sustainable fusion was possible. This article makes it look as though fundamental problems remain unresolved; hardly reassuring when you're building a full scale unit with such major issues like what you're going to build the damn thing out of.
Where did you get that idea?
ITER is going to be the testbed for the technology needed to make a commercial fusion reactor possible. The unsolved problems each have potential solutions to them, each of which will need to be tested. After ITER, the next step is a prototype reactor, one which incorporates the technology developed during the testing process. The step after that is commercial power generators.
The problems with fusion are not really "fundamental". They're just difficult. None are deal-breakers, and for each of them several possible solutions exist.
Imagine the hurdles that remain as being akin to the hurdles that faced us during the space race. Everything that we needed, we knew we could make. The science was long since done, the work fell to the engineers. We knew we could go into space as early as the turn of the twentieth century. It took 50 years to get there, and that's with three wars that spurred the requisite R&D (the first brought a boon to the aeronautics field, the second brought us rocketry and the cold war gave us a competitive environment for the space race).
Believe it or not, that's been suggested, perhaps unsurprisingly in the USSR during the cold war.
It isn't all that practical a power source. There's no benefit to it over a conventional fission reactor, and several drawbacks. Notably, bombs are more expensive and challenging to make than fuel pellets, the security risk is much greater if somebody hijacks your fuel, radioactive material released in this manner has an annoying tendency to find it's way into the atmosphere or water table, and finally, whatever you build the blast chamber under is going to get hammered every time you light it up. Your granite mountain might become an irradiated gravel heap, given enough time.
In both of those scenarios the difficulty stays constant - only perceptions change. Nothing has become harder, they've just realised that they're not as easy as they initially suspected.
It's the same as people in the 60s who thought that we'd have intelligent robot house servants and flying cars by now..
As has been pointed out before, the "flying cars" business isn't about technology, so much as safety and efficiency. We've got helicopters after all, and some models aren't much bigger than a car. Now try to imagine what a city full of DMV certified copter pilots, each in a machine more vulnerable and fragile than a car, all bumping into each other, would be like.
Back on topic, I think it's less about perceptions and more about easy problems versus hard ones. The easy problems of fusion have been solved. Simply causing fusion to happen artificially came first, with the hydrogen bomb. Causing it to happen without prior fission came next. Now we're up to sustaining it, and getting net power out of it, which are harder than the previous problems. Still solvable, but the R&D needed is more complex.
And the researchers could get a Nobel Prize and could name their price for a job with a company building commercial fusion plants, and...
Yeah, score one for common sense there. Mod the AC up.
Forget the Nobel Prize, they'd be looking at their names in the history books. Nobel winners come and go, but technological breakthroughs of this magnitude happen a couple times a century, max. Do you know what most researchers in science and engineering would do for that kind of legacy?
The problem is not foot dragging (except on the part of the bean counters). Simply put, the problems associated with building a working fusion power plant, while not insurmountable, are still very difficult. Net energy output is only the beginning; you need a way to exchange fuel for waste from the working plasma, you need to be able to keep the containment running without an hiccups (or the whole thing stops working), you need to maintain superconductivity in the magnets...
It isn't enough to break even, you need to break even and keep going before you can hook up to the grid and supply power. This is why they say it'll be decades instead of years; we aren't that far from the break-even point, but then there's all the other steps after that.
Far as I know there's been no progress, even in the lab, since then.
Then perhaps it is time to expand your knowledge?
We have built working toroid reactors since the 1970s. Just such a reactor, JET, is mentioned in TFA. The problem is no longer whether such a design will work. Nor is ignition the problem; we've achieved that years ago. Controlled fusion exists, here, now, in the present. This wasn't the case in the 1970s (well, there were Farnsworth fusors and H-bombs, but those are both significantly different cases).
The problem now lies in getting net energy out of it, and keeping the reaction going over long enough durations to generate useful amounts of electricity. This is indeed physically possible (see for instance the centre of the sun), it's just very challenging from a practical standpoint. The engineering hasn't caught up, in part because the number of testbeds for new designs is sharply limited. ITER is supposed to be the next such testing ground for new engineering solutions, but as you can see, it's having trouble getting political and financial backing.
Also, this "fusion has been 50 years away for the past 30 years" meme gets on my nerves. It's selective perception, and utter bullshit. People remember the promise of fusion, but forget that we were politically and financially unwilling to pay for it. The research wasn't going to just happen magically, someone needed to underwrite it.
Had we done the needed R&D decades ago, we would be decades ahead of where we are now. We didn't. You get what you put in, and in this case we put in nowhere near what we ought to have. Result is that we're behind.
I covered that in the next paragraph, which you omitted in your quote. Did you miss the part about people in rich countries using more resources per person?
In any case, your point assumes the level of per-capita pollution in the developing world is static, whereas it is in fact rising sharply. The US pollutes more per person today than, say, China or India, but as the local technological and economic conditions in those countries rise toward parity with the US, so too do the rates of pollution.
Meanwhile, the developed world as a whole is actually trying to reduce it's emissions, something that nobody in the world has done before. In the long run, an immigrant and their children may do less damage if they move to an environmentally progressive state. Doubly so if immigrating means having fewer kids in the long run.
So what you're saying is true today, but will not be true for much longer.
What you're missing is that we currently pay people to have children. In our modern society, removing a benefit is considered punishment.
Since immigrants tend to have more children... well, you can do the math.
I have disagreed with those programs for years. To date, nobody has called me "racist" or assumed my opposition to giving people a bonus for having kids stemmed from a dislike of immigrants. If I were to argue against those incentives for immigrants, while suggesting they should be kept for locals, that would be different.
I think you're conflating two issues here. The first is immigration leading to a larger population. The second is government tax breaks providing an incentive to have kids. I disagree with you on the former, and agree with you on the latter.
In any case, the artificial incentives to have kids are small, compared to the natural incentives not to. I would like to see the artificial incentives removed, but I do not think they ultimately have a large impact on a person's decision to breed, or not to breed.
Consider how costly dependants are in the developed world. If you're going to have kids here, it's going to cost you a fortune in the long run. Against that, you have the small incentive of tax breaks, which will not even come close to break even. If you've got other government programs on top of the tax breaks, it might make a difference (and I'm none too fond of those programs either), but alone, the breaks aren't going to sway a person's decision making.
Why haven't we found a way to capture energy from the radioactive waste and convert it to power?
It's called a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator.
The problem is that waste isn't very energetic. To make a RTG work at top efficiency requires specialized isotopes, which are not present in abundance in the waste from your average reactor. You could use an RTG at a much lower efficiency with any old decaying waste, but the power output would be pathetic. And you can't make RTGs cheaply, because that would involve cutting corners - never a good idea with nuclear power.
Simply put, the stuff that genuinely is "waste", and cannot be reprocessed into fuel, isn't much use for much of anything. A few isotopes might be useful, for power generation or other applications, but there is always going to be a remainder that needs to be disposed of permanently.
Also: I'm going to keep saying it - combine wind and solar. We have technology available that could be adapted into a hybrid wind/solar installation, a wind turbine coated with thin-film solar panels would harness loads more energy in pretty much the same footprint. In Southern California, there's a wind farm just down the I-10 that would benefit greatly from this idea because of the location, up high with no obstructions, and lots and lots of sunlight. So much potential energy gathering capability gone totally unused.
Combined power collection stations are in the pipe. Trust me, you're not the only one who thinks this is a good idea - it's been on the table for years. We'll probably see more of them in the next decade or so.
However, we do not absolutely have to build centralized power collectors to provide energy to the grid. Distributed power collection may be a better option in the long term, provided there are enough high-output generators to supply the power needed to take up the slack.
True, but he referred to "tension exerted on their cables" as a means to generate power. I visualized his proposal as something like an buoy anchored to the seabed, which has in fact been done for previous offshore wind power systems. I'm not positive, but I don't think his idea will work if the tether is simply a line to keep the buoy from floating away.
Bah, I typed that in a hurry. For starters, I meant to talk of both hulls and keels and conflated them. My bad.
Wide hull, deep keel. Better?
And how exactly have I got buoyancy wrong? If you're listing sideways buoyancy is (part of) what rights you. The dipping side is tries to rise up, while the rising side tries to fall down, both because they've changed in depth from where they ought to be. This is an oversimplification, but not an inaccurate one.
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Please note - I am not stating how things should be, I am merely stating how they are.
The undeniable fact of the matter is that these laws remain in effect because people are unwilling to oppose them, if doing so means defending bigots. I assume you do not disagree with my assessment?
I am not saying this is morally right, and in point of fact I see this as a bad thing. Were I a criminal defence lawyer living in the UK, I would seriously consider taking their case as a matter of principle (I am none of those things, but we're talking hypothetically). The fact I find the defendants despicable does not mean I think they deserve to be prosecuted for it.
So using phrases like "if you actually believe" implies that you missed the point. What I believe is right is immaterial to a discussion about what is actually happening.
(I'm replying to your post, since you're logged in, but this reply applies to the ACs above you as well).
The summary is somewhat misleading.
The convicted parties were handing out leaflets in the UK, which drew complaints due to their racist content. The content of the leaflets was stored on a US server, but "published" (printed really) in the UK. Both defendants lived in the UK, but sought asylum in the US after they were charged.
Jurisdiction is not the problem here - in every country I know of, storing "illegal material" outside the local borders does not constitute a legal defence. If we were talking about weapons or drugs, then storing internationally (say in a safe haven where they're legal) while distributing locally (where they're illegal) would still get you charged.
The question is whether the material should be illegal in the first place. That has nothing to do with jurisdiction and everything to do with civil liberties.
"Hate crime" is a blanket term for laws that regulate speech with the intent of suppressing racism. More recently this has expanded to include homophobia. How those laws are viewed largely depends on whether the viewer feels more strongly about bigotry or censorship; whether you see a greater evil in suppression of speech or unreasoning hatred.
I'd call censorship the greater evil, but despite that I'm ambivalent about this particular case. On the one hand, I do not think such a law ought to exist at all, on the other hand, I just can't muster any outrage at a neo-Nazi getting jailed. I suspect that it's cases like this that allow such laws to remain in effect - try to oppose the law on principle and you'll find yourself in the position of having to defend the bigots, something that even those most committed to free speech find repellent.
I'd say Portal was also fairly funny, even if the memes it sprouted have started to wear out their welcome.
And I can think of dozens of RPGs, old and recent, that had their funny moments. Though in those cases they tended to be serious games with the occasional comic relief.
I think TFA is expecting games that are purely comedic, i.e. in the same vein as Monkey Island, and those never were that common. All the classic games that fit that bill are either adventure games, which don't get made anymore, or aimed mainly at a young audience. Pure comedy written for adults (and no, that doesn't mean "mature" in the sense of inappropriate for kids) is a niche that's largely empty, but what we have instead in abundance is non-comedic games that don't take themselves too seriously.
I absolutely agree that what he said is not only true but very well stated. What I meant was he's crazy if he thinks he's going to educate all /. readers with anything short of an infinite series of posts
"Sanity is much like virginity. Once lost, it never really bothers you again." :-P
(Just so we're clear, the exasperation in my initial post was somewhat overstated. If I ever truly got tired of explaining things, I suspect boredom would follow soon after.)
Ugh. I get tired of having to explain this. You'd think it'd stick the first dozen times or so, and I wouldn't have to keep repeating myself.
The CO2 from your breath is not the problem. The CO2 from your tailpipe is.
The reason is their source. Carbon from food is ultimately bound via photosynthesis; you either eat the plants or eat the animals that eat the plants. Photosynthesis removes free CO2 from the air and binds the carbon, releasing the oxygen. Any high school student can tell you this.
Every last ounce of CO2 coming out of your mouth, right now as you're reading this, was previously bound up as food, which was living tissue once, which (directly or indirectly) grew via taking CO2 out of the air. It's a closed cycle. Exhaling more CO2 will not result in a net increase in the carbon cycle.
Your tailpipe is different. The hydrocarbons you're burning come from fossil fuels, which have been sequestered from the atmosphere for the past few million years. Burning them does add a net amount of CO2 to the carbon cycle.
Climate change is not about what's in the air, it's about what's no longer in the ground. This is why Biofuels are a solution - the IC engine can be totally identical to one running on fossil fuels, but the hydrocarbons are grown rather than mined.
Again, over 50% of laws in the UK are rubber-stamping EU regulations: many of those pushed through the EU by current or failed British socialist politcos who could never have got the same laws through in the UK. How will writing to a Labour MP change that?
By getting them not to rubber stamp it?
Given the amount of opposition I remember the UK having toward the EU, it seems to me that this should be the easier part. Granted, much of that opposition is no more, but the sentiment of remaining apart from continental affairs has a long, deeply rooted history.
As far as that goes, the EU itself can be changed. The problem in that case is not strictly limited to the UK, but if enough people in Europe want change to happen, it will. See previous about the problem of getting enough people pointed in the same direction.
22% of voters voted for the Labour party, but they won anyway. Where do you get the idea that people support the current state of affairs?
Did I say the majority supported the current state of affairs? I did not.
All it takes is enough of the people supporting the current state, and enough of the rest not caring, for things to remain as is. That can be 22%. It can also be 5%. It all depends on the particulars.
If anything, this fact should offer you some encouragement. You don't need to rally 51% of the population to effect change in the government.
Britain is simply broken: the only way to change it is civil war or catastrophic collapse. The smart people are getting out before they require exit visas.
This is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If everyone who sees the erosion of civil liberties as a bad thing gives up and gets out, then it really will come down to a revolution as the only solution. And who's to say that their new home won't suffer the same downfall ten, twenty or fifty years from now?
(Disclaimer: I am not the GP, nor am I precisely "libertarian".)
Please, explain exactly why the police watching you & everyone else all the time in public is bad. What, exactly, is the problem there?
To my way of thinking, the question is backwards. It should not be up to me to show them why their system is a problem, it should be up to them to show why it is necessary.
I'll agree that you give up some privacy in a public place. That's common sense. But I see a difference between that and having your every move in public recorded.
You're falling into the trap of assuming that a political party is an entity in its own right, instead of an abstraction. Rip open the heart of a party, and what falls out? People.
Either change the views of the people who hold the power, or replace them with others, and the situation changes. I'm not going to suggest this is easy, but I am going to suggest that if the constituents of a given Labour MP started flooding his or her office with letters pushing for change, it'd be a step in the right direction.
This does get us to the larger problems, which are apathy and support for the current state of affairs. If the current crop of politicians didn't have popular support for what they were doing, they'd be out of a job. So part of what needs to happen is getting through to enough of the people who either want the current government or don't care either way.
Where there is great freedom for you, there is great freedom for others to take advantage of you.
It doesn't have to be that way.
Real life governance is not some sliding scale where total anarchy is one end and Orwellian tyranny is the other. Is any social question so one dimensional? Thinking that way boxes you in, because it starts to look like a damned if you do, damned if you don't, scenario. You begin to accept corruption, because the anarchy scares you, or you embrace anarchy, because you don't see any alternative to getting rid of tyranny.
To give you a depressing example of why this line of thinking fails, consider this. A government can be corrupt, tyrannical and totally ineffectual, all at once, such as to leave a country in a state whereby the citizenry have no freedom, and no safety. That doesn't fit anywhere into the worldview that holds anarchy and tyranny as logically opposite extremes, because, hey, you have both. Usually this comes about when a corrupt government is in a state of strife or internal warfare, while still aspiring to ironclad rule - think Afghanistan.
The reverse is also true. An accountable government with limited, but not nonexistent, power, can run a country without falling into the pitfalls above. It must be democratic, it must be as transparent as possible, and it must have a strong judiciary backed by laws that include some sort of bill of rights or equivalent document above all others. Checks and balances are the key. Cleaning out corruption when it occurs is also vital, and failure to do so is usually what trips the whole system up.
The problem is, and always has been, that maintaining good government is a lot of work. Bad government is the default setting when it is not fought against.
While I understand where you're coming from, I strongly disagree. The existence of tyranny abroad does not excuse the erosion of liberty at home. Hell, forget Iran, I could think of a dozen far worse places to live without thinking hard, and yet I still see the point of the person who posted the article.
Simply put, the attitude you're expressing, namely "it's much worse over there, so why are you complaining?" is a common one, and very problematic. How is a person in a country that is relatively free, but headed in the wrong direction, supposed to agitate for change in that worldview? There is, after all, always someplace worse.
We, in the rich, safe, peaceful developed world, should aspire to do much better than Iran. We ought to make ourselves a bastion for civil liberties, human rights and responsible self-governance. Iran has a bad situation made worse by factors beyond the control of the average citizen; we have no such excuse.
That being said, my suggestion to the person who posted this article is the improve the local situation instead of fleeing from it. If you are among those who see the current trend as a step in the wrong direction, then fight it. If enough people did that, the situation would change. It's getting enough people to realize this that poses a problem.
The question should not be about solar farms. A solar farm is commercial. TFA is an example of a guy who's done this residentially. Bit of a difference there.
A homeowner can afford to make improvements that will not pay off for ten years, provided he has the capital to invest in his house, and plans on living there that long. In this case, the green angle gave him an incentive to go in that direction - a non-financial reason, but a responsible one nonetheless. Given declining costs for solar panels, and rising costs for electricity, this will likely become more common in the next decade.
You asked why commercial farms often use wind instead of solar. Commercial solar power generally doesn't use photoelectric panels, for reasons of price and output. A more effective design would be an array of mirrors focused on a heat engine (Stirling maybe, though it doesn't have to be) connected to a dynamo. That's a little complex for residential use, but more cost effective if the goal is centralized power generation.
The problem is that commercial solar generators are not as cost effective for energy farming in most locations. There are exceptions, mostly places where sunlight is abundant, but you also need a market to sell the power too if you're working commercially. Nevada would be an excellent place to build one (no idea if any such system has ever been proposed there).
Wind farms fare slightly better in terms of the cost to build the windmill. Also, many locations that are well suited for wind farms are much less suited for solar farms, owing to the fact the climate favours the former, but not the latter.
The thing is a part of the house now, and the entire house will continue to appreciate. As people become more interested in solar, a house with solar already in place will appreciate faster.
I could, I suppose, argue that he's getting the same depreciation that every early adopter gets. Cutting edge tech that cost's 38 grand today will cost much less in a decade, assuming the price continues to decline for photoelectric panels. Not to mention that retrofitting a house to be solar is probably a good deal less efficient, and more expensive, than building it solar from the ground up. So his resale is going to be competing with cheaper solar homes that were either refitted later, using lower cost materials of the same quality, or built with the equipment designed in.
But I'm playing the devils advocate - that's not a position I myself agree with. The way I see it, being an early adopter in this case means getting a head start on energy savings. Five years ahead of the game means five years less payments to the power company. And someone's gotta break trail and show that it can be done to make way for the mass market version of the technology - that's the benefit early adopters bring to late adopters.
That's very much true for inertial confinement fusion, which uses the pulse model you describe. In those systems, ignition is akin to spark plugs for an IC engine - one spark, one mass of fuel ignited, repeat.
Magnetic fusion systems like ITER however are meant to use the heat of fusion to sustain ignition. This is probably going to be the more efficient approach, since it means not having to scrape together the energy for ignition repeatedly - start it up, and it'll keep going as long as you put fuel in and retain confinement (neither of which is easy yet). Given the current energy needed for ignition, the magnetic model will likely become net-positive sooner than the inertial model, though I'd obviously invest in research for both were I in charge of such matters.
Also, outside of naval vessels, I'm not sure any vehicle is going to use fusion directly, at least not in any near-future time span, so power-to-weight isn't going to be a concern. For futuristic spacecraft propulsion, inertial confinement would be my pick, particularly if it works for nuclear pulse propulsion.
I was under the impression that ITER was effectively the prelude to full scale fusion, and it was effectively just a scale up from previous designs to see if sustainable fusion was possible. This article makes it look as though fundamental problems remain unresolved; hardly reassuring when you're building a full scale unit with such major issues like what you're going to build the damn thing out of.
Where did you get that idea?
ITER is going to be the testbed for the technology needed to make a commercial fusion reactor possible. The unsolved problems each have potential solutions to them, each of which will need to be tested. After ITER, the next step is a prototype reactor, one which incorporates the technology developed during the testing process. The step after that is commercial power generators.
The problems with fusion are not really "fundamental". They're just difficult. None are deal-breakers, and for each of them several possible solutions exist.
Imagine the hurdles that remain as being akin to the hurdles that faced us during the space race. Everything that we needed, we knew we could make. The science was long since done, the work fell to the engineers. We knew we could go into space as early as the turn of the twentieth century. It took 50 years to get there, and that's with three wars that spurred the requisite R&D (the first brought a boon to the aeronautics field, the second brought us rocketry and the cold war gave us a competitive environment for the space race).
Believe it or not, that's been suggested, perhaps unsurprisingly in the USSR during the cold war.
It isn't all that practical a power source. There's no benefit to it over a conventional fission reactor, and several drawbacks. Notably, bombs are more expensive and challenging to make than fuel pellets, the security risk is much greater if somebody hijacks your fuel, radioactive material released in this manner has an annoying tendency to find it's way into the atmosphere or water table, and finally, whatever you build the blast chamber under is going to get hammered every time you light it up. Your granite mountain might become an irradiated gravel heap, given enough time.
In both of those scenarios the difficulty stays constant - only perceptions change. Nothing has become harder, they've just realised that they're not as easy as they initially suspected.
It's the same as people in the 60s who thought that we'd have intelligent robot house servants and flying cars by now..
As has been pointed out before, the "flying cars" business isn't about technology, so much as safety and efficiency. We've got helicopters after all, and some models aren't much bigger than a car. Now try to imagine what a city full of DMV certified copter pilots, each in a machine more vulnerable and fragile than a car, all bumping into each other, would be like.
Back on topic, I think it's less about perceptions and more about easy problems versus hard ones. The easy problems of fusion have been solved. Simply causing fusion to happen artificially came first, with the hydrogen bomb. Causing it to happen without prior fission came next. Now we're up to sustaining it, and getting net power out of it, which are harder than the previous problems. Still solvable, but the R&D needed is more complex.
And the researchers could get a Nobel Prize and could name their price for a job with a company building commercial fusion plants, and...
Yeah, score one for common sense there. Mod the AC up.
Forget the Nobel Prize, they'd be looking at their names in the history books. Nobel winners come and go, but technological breakthroughs of this magnitude happen a couple times a century, max. Do you know what most researchers in science and engineering would do for that kind of legacy?
The problem is not foot dragging (except on the part of the bean counters). Simply put, the problems associated with building a working fusion power plant, while not insurmountable, are still very difficult. Net energy output is only the beginning; you need a way to exchange fuel for waste from the working plasma, you need to be able to keep the containment running without an hiccups (or the whole thing stops working), you need to maintain superconductivity in the magnets...
It isn't enough to break even, you need to break even and keep going before you can hook up to the grid and supply power. This is why they say it'll be decades instead of years; we aren't that far from the break-even point, but then there's all the other steps after that.
Far as I know there's been no progress, even in the lab, since then.
Then perhaps it is time to expand your knowledge?
We have built working toroid reactors since the 1970s. Just such a reactor, JET, is mentioned in TFA. The problem is no longer whether such a design will work. Nor is ignition the problem; we've achieved that years ago. Controlled fusion exists, here, now, in the present. This wasn't the case in the 1970s (well, there were Farnsworth fusors and H-bombs, but those are both significantly different cases).
The problem now lies in getting net energy out of it, and keeping the reaction going over long enough durations to generate useful amounts of electricity. This is indeed physically possible (see for instance the centre of the sun), it's just very challenging from a practical standpoint. The engineering hasn't caught up, in part because the number of testbeds for new designs is sharply limited. ITER is supposed to be the next such testing ground for new engineering solutions, but as you can see, it's having trouble getting political and financial backing.
Also, this "fusion has been 50 years away for the past 30 years" meme gets on my nerves. It's selective perception, and utter bullshit. People remember the promise of fusion, but forget that we were politically and financially unwilling to pay for it. The research wasn't going to just happen magically, someone needed to underwrite it.
Had we done the needed R&D decades ago, we would be decades ahead of where we are now. We didn't. You get what you put in, and in this case we put in nowhere near what we ought to have. Result is that we're behind.
I covered that in the next paragraph, which you omitted in your quote. Did you miss the part about people in rich countries using more resources per person?
In any case, your point assumes the level of per-capita pollution in the developing world is static, whereas it is in fact rising sharply. The US pollutes more per person today than, say, China or India, but as the local technological and economic conditions in those countries rise toward parity with the US, so too do the rates of pollution.
Meanwhile, the developed world as a whole is actually trying to reduce it's emissions, something that nobody in the world has done before. In the long run, an immigrant and their children may do less damage if they move to an environmentally progressive state. Doubly so if immigrating means having fewer kids in the long run.
So what you're saying is true today, but will not be true for much longer.
What you're missing is that we currently pay people to have children. In our modern society, removing a benefit is considered punishment.
Since immigrants tend to have more children... well, you can do the math.
I have disagreed with those programs for years. To date, nobody has called me "racist" or assumed my opposition to giving people a bonus for having kids stemmed from a dislike of immigrants. If I were to argue against those incentives for immigrants, while suggesting they should be kept for locals, that would be different.
I think you're conflating two issues here. The first is immigration leading to a larger population. The second is government tax breaks providing an incentive to have kids. I disagree with you on the former, and agree with you on the latter.
In any case, the artificial incentives to have kids are small, compared to the natural incentives not to. I would like to see the artificial incentives removed, but I do not think they ultimately have a large impact on a person's decision to breed, or not to breed.
Consider how costly dependants are in the developed world. If you're going to have kids here, it's going to cost you a fortune in the long run. Against that, you have the small incentive of tax breaks, which will not even come close to break even. If you've got other government programs on top of the tax breaks, it might make a difference (and I'm none too fond of those programs either), but alone, the breaks aren't going to sway a person's decision making.
Why haven't we found a way to capture energy from the radioactive waste and convert it to power?
It's called a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator.
The problem is that waste isn't very energetic. To make a RTG work at top efficiency requires specialized isotopes, which are not present in abundance in the waste from your average reactor. You could use an RTG at a much lower efficiency with any old decaying waste, but the power output would be pathetic. And you can't make RTGs cheaply, because that would involve cutting corners - never a good idea with nuclear power.
Simply put, the stuff that genuinely is "waste", and cannot be reprocessed into fuel, isn't much use for much of anything. A few isotopes might be useful, for power generation or other applications, but there is always going to be a remainder that needs to be disposed of permanently.
Also: I'm going to keep saying it - combine wind and solar. We have technology available that could be adapted into a hybrid wind/solar installation, a wind turbine coated with thin-film solar panels would harness loads more energy in pretty much the same footprint. In Southern California, there's a wind farm just down the I-10 that would benefit greatly from this idea because of the location, up high with no obstructions, and lots and lots of sunlight. So much potential energy gathering capability gone totally unused.
Combined power collection stations are in the pipe. Trust me, you're not the only one who thinks this is a good idea - it's been on the table for years. We'll probably see more of them in the next decade or so.
However, we do not absolutely have to build centralized power collectors to provide energy to the grid. Distributed power collection may be a better option in the long term, provided there are enough high-output generators to supply the power needed to take up the slack.
Cool, thanks for the link.
True, but he referred to "tension exerted on their cables" as a means to generate power. I visualized his proposal as something like an buoy anchored to the seabed, which has in fact been done for previous offshore wind power systems. I'm not positive, but I don't think his idea will work if the tether is simply a line to keep the buoy from floating away.
Bah, I typed that in a hurry. For starters, I meant to talk of both hulls and keels and conflated them. My bad.
Wide hull, deep keel. Better?
And how exactly have I got buoyancy wrong? If you're listing sideways buoyancy is (part of) what rights you. The dipping side is tries to rise up, while the rising side tries to fall down, both because they've changed in depth from where they ought to be. This is an oversimplification, but not an inaccurate one.