I understand what you are saying but this is what I've seen in my lifetime.
If the government gives $5000 in aid, tuitions rise to $7000. If the government gives $12,000 in aid, tuitions rise to $15,000.
The college industry charges whatever the government will pay plus more.
If the grants were cut and you could declare bankruptcy from student loans, very rapidly the cost of college would drop as funds dried up. And with the government out of the picture for all but the poorest students, colleges would be forced to charge what people could actually afford.
$1,300 is admittedly a bit low- tho I was going from a higher number. Given today's costs- aid should be limited to about $2600 per semester. Students could live as a student at a minimum wage job and toss another $1,000 on to that.
Everything else is marble buildings and grossly overpaid professors.
When I went to school- I had to work one week to earn the cost of a semester in school. It was easy to afford anything but a law degree (which required 10 weeks of work per semester in school).
The government needs to stop making student loans immune to bankruptcy. They had a 1% default rate prior to the law being passed. It's a unique class of debt.
Then the government needs to limit any financial aid to the inflation adjusted equivalent of 5% of the average national wage (currently about $52k). That should be means based AND grade based after the first year.
I've been with three companies 10 or more years. People who moved made more money and had better skill sets.
In every case, staying did not give me job security. In one case, staying did give me a small pension. That will be nice.
Companies have NO LOYALTY to you. At ANY time the management who are your friends may be fired and a completely evil soulless person or someone who is actively against you may be promoted above you. New company- old company.
How stable does the new company appear to be? Will they let you start with more vacation because you are senior?
I've lived close to work twice in my life and it completely rocked.
It's a very big jump from "the universe came from nothing" to "the universe game from a god who came from nothing" but even a scientist could do that.
It's a much bigger jump from "there is a god who came from nothing and that god is yahweh (or allah)"
and it created the universe and it cares about the residents of ONE planet on ONE star at the edge of ONE galaxy out of billions of planets
and it doesn't want us to eat pig meat and it doesn't want us to engage in any sex except penis to vagina and it doesn't want us to sell skillets on sundays.
And it revealed all this to a primitive people with no real ability to create credible records and then it refuses to do so since then.
And it's all good despite ordering genocide (including killing babies) and killing all humans (including babies and humans) by drowning (a horrific death) when it could apparently just send the spirit of death to kill them quickly (1st born).
But it gives people comfort to be religious and as long as they are not putting a 6' spike up my anus to get me to convert to their religion (catholics 16th century) or block my ability to buy a skillet (protestants, 20th century) I'm fine for them to be religious.
You still pay gasoline taxes or cigarette taxes or tolls or booze taxes or cell phone taxes. If you rent- you still pay property taxes (plus a markup). And as a poor person, you spend most of your income so you pay a lot of sales taxes.
Many of the people "paying no income taxes" are retired and on social security and making less than the $25k limit.
Other than a half dozen exceptions who may pay no taxes in a particular year, the super rich pay a total load of under 18% (including state taxes- incluiding sales taxes).
So we need to state it another way... instead of "50% pay no taxes", it's "Let's raise taxes on poor families and retired people who already pay about a third of their income in state and local taxes."
Not so much...It's a bit in between both of your extremes...
However deaths appear to be limited to about 1,000 or less (quite possibly under 100) except children getting thyroid cancer.
Large areas of the land are livable again with basically double normal background radiation (comparable to living in a city with a lot of stone buildings like New York).
Substantial areas are still (and will be for about 600 years) uninhabitable.
Quotes: This report, covering environmental radiation, human health and socio-economic aspects, is the most comprehensive evaluation of the accidentâ(TM)s consequences to date. About 100 recognized experts from many countries, including Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, have contributed. It represents a consensus view of the eight organizations of the UN family according to their competences and of the three affected countries.
By 2002, more than 4000 thyroid cancer cases among people who were children at the time. (most likely that a large fraction of these thyroid cancers is attributable to radioiodine intake.)
the majority of the âcontaminatedâ(TM) territories are now safe for settlement and economic activity. However, in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and in certain limited areas some restrictions on land-use will need to be retained for decades to come.
With the exception of the on-site reactor personnel and the emergency workers who were present near the destroyed reactor during the time of the accident and shortly afterwards, most of recovery operation workers and people living in the contaminated territories received relatively low whole-body radiation doses, comparable to background radiation levels accumulated over the 20 year period since the accident.
The high dose population was about 1000 people who recieved 2Gy to 20Gy- some died. (paraphrased)
If Pu-241 is 14% of the Pu in Japan, then won't radiation increase over time as it did in Chernobyl?. So 10 years from now these ares with plutonium polution will be more radioactive than they are now.
My understanding is, this is where the 600 year before habitable again figures around Chernobyl come from.
Both weapons grade and reactor grade plutonium contain some plutonium-241. Plutonium-241 decays into americium-241 by emitting a beta particle. Since americium-241 has a far longer half-life (432 years) than plutonium-241 (14.4 years), it builds up as plutonium-241 decays. The gamma radiation from americium-241 decay, which is far stronger than that from plutonium-239, also builds up with the age of the plutonium sample. Therefore, the more plutonium-241 there is and the older the sample, the greater the gamma radiation from the build-up of americium-241.
Since reactor-grade plutonium contains substantial amounts of plutonium-241, the older the sample, the greater the radiation dose to workers handling it.
So they could be getting 300uSv if they spend time outside. I'm assuming radioactive dust gets in the house too. They should have been evacuated if it were at that level since every 3 days they'd be getting the maximum EPA safe annual dosage.
Hmm. you get 4mSv per year so another way of putting it is that they might be getting 120mSv per year now. 100mSv is the lowest dose clearly linked to increased cancer risk.
Couldn't easily find what the increase was like. (10 years? 15 years? cancer rate increases?)
However, half the plutonium will be very radioactive, very intrusive radioactive decay elements in a decade or so. These areas may be uninhabitable for a few hundred years except by old people to whom the cancer risk doesn't matter.
Non-poor middle income hispanic and islamic families average over 2.5 children per family. Their religious and family values make them resistant to lowering their childbirth rates. They will come to dominate the population in time.
If virii and bacteria can become resistant to all manner of antibiotics, what makes you think some substrains of humanity won't be come resistant to 55" LED TV's and cable?
I agree, other than jawboning, there's no moral way.
I consider war more likely than disease.
I do think the first/third world population thing is misleading. There are large growing sub populations in the first world in America and Europe with childbirth rates about 2.5 per couple. They are resistant strains if you view humans as a virus with 55" TV's as a penicillin.
Many 30 year olds I know have had 2 children at this point. They are choosing children first. This may be partially a result of the new poverty?
However, before you get to 281 trillion rabbits they strip the area of food and have a really horrific dying off (so do deer, etc.). Or their crowding makes it easy for a disease to get started.
Projecting to 281 trillion rabbits supports the argument "Clearly, something is going to happen unless the breeding rate is reigned in-- why not do it now?"
There's an interesting article called "limits to growth".
It recognizes that our energy consumption has grown by about 2.9% per year since the 1600's.
Continuing that line forward and combining it with the earth's capacity to dump heat into space, the planet would be an average of 212 degrees in 400 years.
So even if we find "unlimited free energy" (fusion?), we will have to stop increasing our energy usage at some point.
I don't know if we have human caused global warming yet (and the temps could head down soon if we are repeating the heatwave of the 30's and 40's) but simple math shows we can't continue increasing our energy consumption.
Same thing for population growth- even at the current lower rate, human mass == mass of the planet in 500 years.
Personally-- I think it ends very badly within 50 years. A billion or more will probably die.
Divide the class into "business" and "software" people.
Throw a party- Let the business people attend. Make the software people work writing numbers on paper.
Tell them it will be like that the rest of their life. They'll be working 10 hour days and holidays and nights while the business people have nice parties with booze at the bowling alley.
For bonus points, put all but two of the girls in the "business" group. But they won't get it at that age-- so instead give the business group kittens and puppies. But none for the "software" people.
Make them stay up overnight writing numbers on paper while the "business" kids get to go home and watch cartoons.
Tell them how proud you are of them. How they are such hard workers.
Not only can anyone have a recording device, but with the new utilities the recorded data is being instantly streamed to not only a safe site but potentially facebook, youtube or other web sites as an upload in realtime.
The television show-- which included an industry researcher- did not use the vocabulary you are using.
They distinguished between heavy THC and heavy cannabinoid mix. As did the amsterdam toke shop proprieter who had 24 different kinds of toke. She offered a particular one as being heavy THC and advised only taking a couple puffs and stopping. They indicated the THC caused the druggy high- and if you got to much you would feel badly.
Meanwhile, the higher cannabinoid content tokes caused a funnier less spacy high. The researcher who was pumping pure cannabinoids into the reporter's bloodstream intraveneously referred to it as cannabinoids and the reporter was constantly giggling and couldn't keep a straight face even when she tried for more than a few seconds and her voiceover related that the cannabinoid high was very different and much more pleasant than the THC high.
Yes. THC is the heavy paranoid high part. Cannabinoids are the happy laughing part.
They had a cool special on BBC which had a reporter spending 30 days in Amsterdam and you got to see both. She couldn't stop laughing on the Can. But the heavy THC weed- she felt bad and went to sleep for the day.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
View a big screen TV as a new wonder drug for the human virus.
And some part of the culture will resist the drug and come to dominate the population.
It will end badly--- hoping for 50 years instead of 30 years.
I understand what you are saying but this is what I've seen in my lifetime.
If the government gives $5000 in aid, tuitions rise to $7000.
If the government gives $12,000 in aid, tuitions rise to $15,000.
The college industry charges whatever the government will pay plus more.
If the grants were cut and you could declare bankruptcy from student loans, very rapidly the cost of college would drop as funds dried up. And with the government out of the picture for all but the poorest students, colleges would be forced to charge what people could actually afford.
$1,300 is admittedly a bit low- tho I was going from a higher number. Given today's costs- aid should be limited to about $2600 per semester. Students could live as a student at a minimum wage job and toss another $1,000 on to that.
Everything else is marble buildings and grossly overpaid professors.
When I went to school- I had to work one week to earn the cost of a semester in school.
It was easy to afford anything but a law degree (which required 10 weeks of work per semester in school).
The government needs to stop making student loans immune to bankruptcy. They had a 1% default rate prior to the law being passed. It's a unique class of debt.
Then the government needs to limit any financial aid to the inflation adjusted equivalent of 5% of the average national wage (currently about $52k). That should be means based AND grade based after the first year.
You know.. now that they've blocked this site, there is no way the videos will ever be posted on the internet where people can see them. ;-)
hehehe
I've been with three companies 10 or more years.
People who moved made more money and had better skill sets.
In every case, staying did not give me job security.
In one case, staying did give me a small pension. That will be nice.
Companies have NO LOYALTY to you. At ANY time the management who are your friends may be fired and a completely evil soulless person or someone who is actively against you may be promoted above you. New company- old company.
How stable does the new company appear to be? Will they let you start with more vacation because you are senior?
I've lived close to work twice in my life and it completely rocked.
It's a very big jump from "the universe came from nothing" to "the universe game from a god who came from nothing" but even a scientist could do that.
It's a much bigger jump from "there is a god who came from nothing and that god is yahweh (or allah)"
and it created the universe and it cares about the residents of ONE planet on ONE star at the edge of ONE galaxy out of billions of planets
and it doesn't want us to eat pig meat and it doesn't want us to engage in any sex except penis to vagina and it doesn't want us to sell skillets on sundays.
And it revealed all this to a primitive people with no real ability to create credible records and then it refuses to do so since then.
And it's all good despite ordering genocide (including killing babies) and killing all humans (including babies and humans) by drowning (a horrific death) when it could apparently just send the spirit of death to kill them quickly (1st born).
But it gives people comfort to be religious and as long as they are not putting a 6' spike up my anus to get me to convert to their religion (catholics 16th century) or block my ability to buy a skillet (protestants, 20th century) I'm fine for them to be religious.
You still pay gasoline taxes or cigarette taxes or tolls or booze taxes or cell phone taxes.
If you rent- you still pay property taxes (plus a markup). And as a poor person, you spend most of your income so you pay a lot of sales taxes.
Many of the people "paying no income taxes" are retired and on social security and making less than the $25k limit.
Other than a half dozen exceptions who may pay no taxes in a particular year, the super rich pay a total load of under 18% (including state taxes- incluiding sales taxes).
So we need to state it another way... instead of "50% pay no taxes", it's "Let's raise taxes on poor families and retired people who already pay about a third of their income in state and local taxes."
Right now they pay a lower total tax load percentage (23% for the "near wealthy" and under 18% for the top 400 families).
Meanwhile the total tax load on the middle class is running 40%.
The total tax load on the "poor" and retired is running about 30%.
Google "who pays taxes" for the state and local taxes (12% on the poor, .03% on the wealthy).
Google "tax top 400"
Google "total tax load by income bracket".
Tell me more about the private channels?
Not so much...It's a bit in between both of your extremes...
However deaths appear to be limited to about 1,000 or less (quite possibly under 100) except children getting thyroid cancer.
Large areas of the land are livable again with basically double normal background radiation (comparable to living in a city with a lot of stone buildings like New York).
Substantial areas are still (and will be for about 600 years) uninhabitable.
From here...
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf
Quotes:
This report, covering environmental radiation, human health and socio-economic
aspects, is the most comprehensive evaluation of the accidentâ(TM)s consequences to date.
About 100 recognized experts from many countries, including Belarus, Russia and
Ukraine, have contributed. It represents a consensus view of the eight organizations of
the UN family according to their competences and of the three affected countries.
By 2002, more than 4000 thyroid cancer cases among people who were children at the time. (most likely that a large fraction of these thyroid cancers is attributable to radioiodine intake.)
the majority of the âcontaminatedâ(TM) territories are now safe for settlement and economic activity. However, in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and in certain limited areas some restrictions on land-use will need to be retained for decades to come.
With the exception of the on-site reactor personnel and the emergency workers who were present near the destroyed reactor during the time of the accident and
shortly afterwards, most of recovery operation workers and people living in the contaminated territories received relatively low whole-body radiation doses, comparable to background radiation levels accumulated over the 20 year period since the accident.
The high dose population was about 1000 people who recieved 2Gy to 20Gy- some died. (paraphrased)
More exhaustive details within.
Typically once you are aware of a hazard and take no action, you are now liable.
Whether it is a swimming pool with an unlocked gate or an internet connection you know is being abused.
The correct solution is to get your own independent internet solution and not share with the reckless neighbor.
If Pu-241 is 14% of the Pu in Japan, then won't radiation increase over time as it did in Chernobyl?. So 10 years from now these ares with plutonium polution will be more radioactive than they are now.
My understanding is, this is where the 600 year before habitable again figures around Chernobyl come from.
Ah.. here it is... Apparently not confused about Caesium but about Plutonium 241 vs Plutonium.
http://www.ieer.org/ensec/no-3/puchange.html
selective quotes...
Both weapons grade and reactor grade plutonium contain some plutonium-241. Plutonium-241 decays into americium-241 by emitting a beta particle. Since americium-241 has a far longer half-life (432 years) than plutonium-241 (14.4 years), it builds up as plutonium-241 decays. The gamma radiation from americium-241 decay, which is far stronger than that from plutonium-239, also builds up with the age of the plutonium sample. Therefore, the more plutonium-241 there is and the older the sample, the greater the gamma radiation from the build-up of americium-241.
Since reactor-grade plutonium contains substantial amounts of plutonium-241, the older the sample, the greater the radiation dose to workers handling it.
You are correct. I'd crossed it with Caesium-137 which has a 30 year half life.
However, doesn't plutonium also decay into Americurium which is highly radioactive and has a 400ish year half life?
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
Daily background is 10uSv
So they could be getting 300uSv if they spend time outside. I'm assuming radioactive dust gets in the house too. They should have been evacuated if it were at that level since every 3 days they'd be getting the maximum EPA safe annual dosage.
Hmm. you get 4mSv per year so another way of putting it is that they might be getting 120mSv per year now. 100mSv is the lowest dose clearly linked to increased cancer risk.
Couldn't easily find what the increase was like. (10 years? 15 years? cancer rate increases?)
Seems like I'd want to buy a Geiger counter.
However, half the plutonium will be very radioactive, very intrusive radioactive decay elements in a decade or so. These areas may be uninhabitable for a few hundred years except by old people to whom the cancer risk doesn't matter.
I'm hoping for more efficient devices. I was looking at a household energy consumption chart for the U.S. today tho and we are at an all time high.
Rod Stewart is at child #8.
Non-poor middle income hispanic and islamic families average over 2.5 children per family. Their religious and family values make them resistant to lowering their childbirth rates. They will come to dominate the population in time.
If virii and bacteria can become resistant to all manner of antibiotics, what makes you think some substrains of humanity won't be come resistant to 55" LED TV's and cable?
I agree, other than jawboning, there's no moral way.
I consider war more likely than disease.
I do think the first/third world population thing is misleading. There are large growing sub populations in the first world in America and Europe with childbirth rates about 2.5 per couple. They are resistant strains if you view humans as a virus with 55" TV's as a penicillin.
Many 30 year olds I know have had 2 children at this point. They are choosing children first. This may be partially a result of the new poverty?
I get your point...
However, before you get to 281 trillion rabbits they strip the area of food and have a really horrific dying off (so do deer, etc.). Or their crowding makes it easy for a disease to get started.
Projecting to 281 trillion rabbits supports the argument "Clearly, something is going to happen unless the breeding rate is reigned in-- why not do it now?"
There's an interesting article called "limits to growth".
It recognizes that our energy consumption has grown by about 2.9% per year since the 1600's.
Continuing that line forward and combining it with the earth's capacity to dump heat into space, the planet would be an average of 212 degrees in 400 years.
So even if we find "unlimited free energy" (fusion?), we will have to stop increasing our energy usage at some point.
I don't know if we have human caused global warming yet (and the temps could head down soon if we are repeating the heatwave of the 30's and 40's) but simple math shows we can't continue increasing our energy consumption.
Same thing for population growth- even at the current lower rate, human mass == mass of the planet in 500 years.
Personally-- I think it ends very badly within 50 years. A billion or more will probably die.
Divide the class into "business" and "software" people.
Throw a party-
Let the business people attend.
Make the software people work writing numbers on paper.
Tell them it will be like that the rest of their life.
They'll be working 10 hour days and holidays and nights while the business people have nice parties with booze at the bowling alley.
For bonus points, put all but two of the girls in the "business" group. But they won't get it at that age-- so instead give the business group kittens and puppies. But none for the "software" people.
Make them stay up overnight writing numbers on paper while the "business" kids get to go home and watch cartoons.
Tell them how proud you are of them. How they are such hard workers.
Not only can anyone have a recording device, but with the new utilities the recorded data is being instantly streamed to not only a safe site but potentially facebook, youtube or other web sites as an upload in realtime.
The television show-- which included an industry researcher- did not use the vocabulary you are using.
They distinguished between heavy THC and heavy cannabinoid mix. As did the amsterdam toke shop proprieter who had 24 different kinds of toke. She offered a particular one as being heavy THC and advised only taking a couple puffs and stopping. They indicated the THC caused the druggy high- and if you got to much you would feel badly.
Meanwhile, the higher cannabinoid content tokes caused a funnier less spacy high. The researcher who was pumping pure cannabinoids into the reporter's bloodstream intraveneously referred to it as cannabinoids and the reporter was constantly giggling and couldn't keep a straight face even when she tried for more than a few seconds and her voiceover related that the cannabinoid high was very different and much more pleasant than the THC high.
It was a BBC production- perhaps you can find it.
I'm sure you are correct in some fashion.
Would love to have a link for the sewage comment.
Yes. THC is the heavy paranoid high part. Cannabinoids are the happy laughing part.
They had a cool special on BBC which had a reporter spending 30 days in Amsterdam and you got to see both. She couldn't stop laughing on the Can. But the heavy THC weed- she felt bad and went to sleep for the day.