The vast majority of that Chernobyl death toll is a projection based on a very small increased risk of cancer across millions of people in the region. It is statistically impossible to detect whether Chernobyl is actually having the projected effect.
No such analysis has yet been conducted for Fukushima.
Yes, and letting loose Ron Paul on the US government would be like a company replacing all their Windows desktops with VT100 terminals connected to a server running Gentoo overnight, and telling the secretaries and PHB's that, hey, you've got C and Perl installed, so you can build the functionality you want better yourselves.
You clearly have no idea whatsoever of the immense amount of pain and dislocation that would be caused by such a "refactoring".
If you assume the LNT (theory A) the cumulative effects of the dose at Fukushima on the surrounding population might be a 0.1% increase in cancer deaths over what would be expected. Given that there are 100,000 people in the vicinity, that might be 100 extra deaths (pulling numbers out of my backside here, but they are plausible to within an order of magnitude).
The trouble is that a sample size of 100,000 isn't enough to reliably demonstrate a 0.1% increase in cancer rates, in the same way that tossing a coin 100,000 times isn't enough to reliably demonstrate that a coin comes up heads 50.1% of the time rather than 50.
There's no way in the world we'll ever get this kind of data from human studies absent global nuclear war, in which case we'll have more important things to worry about. The only plausible way you might useful data would be a very, very large scale animal study, probably costing many millions of dollars.
Yes, that is *very* quick. It's within cooee of the BMW M5, which, if not the world's fastest sedan, is very close to it. Another way of looking at it - that's an average of 0.6G of acceleration. Peak acceleration at low speeds would be even higher. But even 0.6G is getting slammed - hard - into the back of your seat.
It's worth pointing out that they've chosen the most favourable acceleration statistic to quote. Electric cars are extremely quick at lower speeds, but their acceleration tails off more quickly than petrol-engined vehicles. Over the quarter-mile (standard dragstrip distance) or around a racetrack, I wouldn't expect the Model S to get anywhere near an M5.
However, for a luxury sedan, the Tesla will be more than fast enough, will have that instant throttle response that makes overtaking a breeze, and be eerily quiet. If I could afford one, I'd buy one.
It's simplistic to think of governmental budgets in the same way you might think of a household budget.
Go and read some introductory microeconomics and contemporary political debate will simultaneously start to make more sense, and look utterly infantile.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Wikileaks, I would take anything said in Assange's "autobiography", unauthorized or not, with several spoonfuls of salt. An article by Robert Manne struggles with some of the computing-related stuff, but fills in some useful background.
As he puts it:
There is, however, a problem. Journalists as senior as David Leigh of the Guardian or John F. Burns of the New York Times in general accept on trust many of Assange’s stories about himself. They do not understand that, like many natural writers, he has fashioned his life into a fable.
Many universities/consortia have supercomputers available on which researchers can apply for (or buy) time. For example, my university is a member of VPAC, which has a big-arse cluster shared between a number of institutions.
She might get much better bang for buck if she uses the money for that, rather than splashing out for dedicated hardware.
With 21st century technology and systems, the variability of alternative energy sources can be compensated over types or distances and easily create a reliable baseline equivalent.
I've no doubt it can be done. The question is "at what cost"?
At the present time, the answer would be very f-ing expensively. Solar panels and wind turbines are becoming increasingly cheap. Energy storage technologies are coming down in price much more slowly.
However, they try to do so with a bit more subtlety than Adams' imagined Golgafrinchan macroeconomists.
And immensely more subtlety than our friend the OP, whom is utterly delusional. Encouraging currency hoarding rates roughly up there with Caucescu's "export everything" policy as the silliest economic policy idea of all time.
I teach some Unix system programming courses at a college. These might be a really good tool for that; for negligible cost, the students can have a fully-functional Linux box gives them real hardware root access, without the risk that they'll do any damage to anything.
If you're willing to believe in an omnipotent God who can arbitrarily intervene in his creation (the Universe), this kind of analysis is surely missing the point.
If God wants to speed up the rate of mutation just at the times and places we're not watching, he can do so. Heck, he can screw with scientific evidence-gathering to hide his tracks, too. Heck, he might have actually created the world five minutes ago. And if you're convinced that the Bible contains the literal word of God you can assume any amount of this gap-filling to make the evidence consistent with Genesis.
Yes, this might seem a horribly illogical thing to do, but we mortals are not to guess at the motives of God. He had a purpose for all this trickery (just like the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda, the tsunami in Japan, AIDS, smallpox, and the curse of the Bambino).
So trying to convince a young earth creationist that their beliefs are inconsistent with evidence and logic is kinda pointless, when they're prepared to twist logic and evidence to any lengths necessary to remove the inconsistency.
Libertarians, they're always good for a laugh...
While the specifics are the exact opposite, the level of practicality is right up there with Trotskyites.
Just because you or even your friends haven't changed their driving patterns in response to changes in fuel prices, doesn't mean nobody will.
And what you do in the short run and long run are two different things. When it comes time to buy a new automobile, is it just within the realms of possibility that you might take mileage a bit more seriously than you did when buying your present car?
You could try following some of the following handy links on price elasticity of gasoline.
But if you're too lazy for that, you could read the money quote about one of the two meta-analyses that found broadly comparable results:
Espey examined 101 different studies and found that in the short-run (defined as 1 year or less), the average price-elasticity of demand for gasoline is -0.26. That is, a 10% hike in the price of gasoline lowers quantity demanded by 2.6%. In the long-run (defined as longer than 1 year), the price elasticity of demand is -0.58; a 10% hike in gasoline causes quantity demanded to decline by 5.8% in the long run.
So next time you go spouting off, make sure the facts actually back up your argument. Oh, I forget, conservatives create don't need no stinkin' facts - they make up their own when convenient.
This would mean that an increasingly small fraction of economic activity would depend heavily on energy, so that food production, manufacturing, transportation, etc. would be relegated to economic insignificance. Activities like selling and buying existing houses, financial transactions, innovations (including new ways to move money around), fashion, and psychotherapy will be effectively all that’s left. Consequently, the price of food, energy, and manufacturing would drop to negligible levels relative to the fluffy stuff. And is this realistic—that a vital resource at its physical limit gets arbitrarily cheap? Bizarre.
That's precisely what has been happening in the real economy at least since the 1950s - the service sector now constitutes around 75% of the US economy, and that proportion continues to grow.
When you take the hyperbole away, the issues around the US federal budget are actually about this transition. The health sector is becoming a larger and larger sector of the economy. The fight is over how this should be paid for and allocated. Liberals claim that government can do this most fairly and efficiently, in large part by raising taxation levels and procuring health services (through, for instance, Medicare). Conservatives believe that the private sector is the best way to do so. But, whatever your position, it's all about the health sector taking up a larger and larger fraction of GDP.
There are other places where the author's understanding of economic history is a bit shaky. He claims:
For instance, if food production shrinks to 1% of our economy, while staying at a comparable absolute scale as it is today (we must eat, after all), then food is effectively very cheap relative to the paychecks that let us enjoy the fruits of the broader economy. This would mean that farmers’ wages would sink far lower than they are today relative to other members of society, so they could not enjoy the innovations and improvements the rest of us can pay for.
No, it doesn't mean that. It means that there will be fewer farmers, a phenomenon that started with the Industrial Revolution and has been continuing almost without interruption ever since.
I have a Polo GTI. Around the city, you can drive it like an auto; it's not quite as smooth off the line as an auto or a well-driven manual, but it's fine.
At any other time, it shifts faster and more smoothly than I could hope to manage. Its auto modes (normal and sport) are very good; paddle shifting is fun but almost redundant, in sports mode it's in pretty much the gear you want all the time.
One of the problems with this argument is it ignores the very simple concept of "opportunity cost". That is, what else could we have done with the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the space program over the last few decades?
If it's commercially useful technologies you want, for instance, I strongly suspect you'd get a whole lot more of them by simply giving the National Science Foundation a whole lot more money to fund scientific research, rather than funding the development of technologies specifically related to space flight, only a small fraction of which will find commercial applicability elsewhere.
Space science and engineering, particularly that relating to crewed missions, should be funded or not funded on its own merits, rather than relying on arguments about better toasters and pacemaker batteries. They're a useful bonus, and advocates should treat them as such.
...and every investment adviser in the world would tell him to diversify his assets.
He takes 5% of his current net worth and sticks it in a global property portfolio, another 5% in an index fund, and maybe 2% in cash and other liquid assets, and even if Facebook dies tomorrow he's still an extraordinarily rich man.
For that matter, the Winklevoss twins are also extraordinarily rich, and will remain so.
I'm not so impressed with the "world's fastest computer" schtick. Take a CPU/GPU with more cores, add a couple of cabinets, and there you go - world's fastest computer (with all due respect to the hardware engineers who put these things together).
The tricky part is figuring out how to divide your particular problem up so you can actually keep those 100,000-odd cores working, not waiting for intermediate results from other cores.
And if you thin it's difficult now, in ten years from now the world's fastest supercomputer will probably have something in the order of a billion (thousand million) cores.
But then again, your average PC (or smartphone) may well have hundreds of CPU cores on it, and today's average CS student won't have a clue how to take advantage of that architecture.
After teaching programming for a while now, it's my very strong suspicion that far more performance bottlenecks are caused by programmers who don't even understand what time and space complexity is, than are caused by competent programmers implementing in one language over another.
For instance, I just set a scripting assignment (to be completed in bash 3.0, which lacks associative arrays) which asked students to process syslog files and report how many times different applications appeared in the logs. Some students did this by repeatedly using grep and wc over the entire log file, and wondered why I deducted marks when it took a minute to run on moderately large logs.
God help anyone who uses a program they've written.
History is littered with wildly successful startup companies turning into boring ones. It happened to Xerox. It happened to Apple. It happened to Microsoft. And it will happen to Google and Facebook too, to pick the current companies of the moment.
Gates was, I think, smart enough to realize this and found something more exciting to do with his time than run a boring office products company.
The GDP of the United States is around 14.5 trillion dollars. Taking an average historical growth rate of 3.2% per year, the cumulative GDP of the US from 2011 to 2050 is 1144 trillion dollars.
Therefore, your supposedly preposterous cost represents around 10% of GDP over the period.
In any case, your numbers are an exaggeration even in 2011, and you'd have to be horribly pessimistic to assume the costs of wind turbines and solar energy aren't going to drop over that period. For one thing, the current commodity price spike can't last forever.
Even ignoring thorium for the moment, the uranium supply for breeder reactors is inexhaustible by any sensible definition.
You can extract uranium from seawater, in principle. The only real question is the cost. However, with breeder reactors the fuel cost is essentially irrelevant, so this is no barrier.
Enough uranium is added to the ocean every year (by eroding land dissolving) to more than meet any conceivable level of energy demand, if it was burned in a breeder reactor.
It's not a perpetual motion machine in the theoretical sense, but we can continue to run our society using breeder reactors until the sun becomes a red giant and vapourizes the oceans.
Nobody seems to be paying attention to Wikileaks' true motives.
Aside from Assange liking the attention, he has written before about his desire to end the practice of government secrecy. While I happen to think there is far too much government secrecy, I don't subscribe to his radical transparency agenda he espouses.
As such, his primary interest is not so much the specific content of the leaks and their geopolitical implications, more that they are kept secret by governments.
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The vast majority of that Chernobyl death toll is a projection based on a very small increased risk of cancer across millions of people in the region. It is statistically impossible to detect whether Chernobyl is actually having the projected effect. No such analysis has yet been conducted for Fukushima.
Yes, and letting loose Ron Paul on the US government would be like a company replacing all their Windows desktops with VT100 terminals connected to a server running Gentoo overnight, and telling the secretaries and PHB's that, hey, you've got C and Perl installed, so you can build the functionality you want better yourselves. You clearly have no idea whatsoever of the immense amount of pain and dislocation that would be caused by such a "refactoring".
If you assume the LNT (theory A) the cumulative effects of the dose at Fukushima on the surrounding population might be a 0.1% increase in cancer deaths over what would be expected. Given that there are 100,000 people in the vicinity, that might be 100 extra deaths (pulling numbers out of my backside here, but they are plausible to within an order of magnitude). The trouble is that a sample size of 100,000 isn't enough to reliably demonstrate a 0.1% increase in cancer rates, in the same way that tossing a coin 100,000 times isn't enough to reliably demonstrate that a coin comes up heads 50.1% of the time rather than 50. There's no way in the world we'll ever get this kind of data from human studies absent global nuclear war, in which case we'll have more important things to worry about. The only plausible way you might useful data would be a very, very large scale animal study, probably costing many millions of dollars.
It's worth pointing out that they've chosen the most favourable acceleration statistic to quote. Electric cars are extremely quick at lower speeds, but their acceleration tails off more quickly than petrol-engined vehicles. Over the quarter-mile (standard dragstrip distance) or around a racetrack, I wouldn't expect the Model S to get anywhere near an M5.
However, for a luxury sedan, the Tesla will be more than fast enough, will have that instant throttle response that makes overtaking a breeze, and be eerily quiet. If I could afford one, I'd buy one.
A rocket lower stage isn't *that* big or heavy. Say it costs $500,000 to ship it back. That's still a massive win, right?
It's simplistic to think of governmental budgets in the same way you might think of a household budget. Go and read some introductory microeconomics and contemporary political debate will simultaneously start to make more sense, and look utterly infantile.
As he puts it:
Many universities/consortia have supercomputers available on which researchers can apply for (or buy) time. For example, my university is a member of VPAC, which has a big-arse cluster shared between a number of institutions. She might get much better bang for buck if she uses the money for that, rather than splashing out for dedicated hardware.
I've no doubt it can be done. The question is "at what cost"?
At the present time, the answer would be very f-ing expensively. Solar panels and wind turbines are becoming increasingly cheap. Energy storage technologies are coming down in price much more slowly.
However, they try to do so with a bit more subtlety than Adams' imagined Golgafrinchan macroeconomists.
And immensely more subtlety than our friend the OP, whom is utterly delusional. Encouraging currency hoarding rates roughly up there with Caucescu's "export everything" policy as the silliest economic policy idea of all time.
I teach some Unix system programming courses at a college. These might be a really good tool for that; for negligible cost, the students can have a fully-functional Linux box gives them real hardware root access, without the risk that they'll do any damage to anything.
If you're willing to believe in an omnipotent God who can arbitrarily intervene in his creation (the Universe), this kind of analysis is surely missing the point. If God wants to speed up the rate of mutation just at the times and places we're not watching, he can do so. Heck, he can screw with scientific evidence-gathering to hide his tracks, too. Heck, he might have actually created the world five minutes ago. And if you're convinced that the Bible contains the literal word of God you can assume any amount of this gap-filling to make the evidence consistent with Genesis. Yes, this might seem a horribly illogical thing to do, but we mortals are not to guess at the motives of God. He had a purpose for all this trickery (just like the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda, the tsunami in Japan, AIDS, smallpox, and the curse of the Bambino). So trying to convince a young earth creationist that their beliefs are inconsistent with evidence and logic is kinda pointless, when they're prepared to twist logic and evidence to any lengths necessary to remove the inconsistency.
Libertarians, they're always good for a laugh... While the specifics are the exact opposite, the level of practicality is right up there with Trotskyites.
Just because you or even your friends haven't changed their driving patterns in response to changes in fuel prices, doesn't mean nobody will. And what you do in the short run and long run are two different things. When it comes time to buy a new automobile, is it just within the realms of possibility that you might take mileage a bit more seriously than you did when buying your present car?
So next time you go spouting off, make sure the facts actually back up your argument. Oh, I forget, conservatives create don't need no stinkin' facts - they make up their own when convenient.
That's precisely what has been happening in the real economy at least since the 1950s - the service sector now constitutes around 75% of the US economy, and that proportion continues to grow. When you take the hyperbole away, the issues around the US federal budget are actually about this transition. The health sector is becoming a larger and larger sector of the economy. The fight is over how this should be paid for and allocated. Liberals claim that government can do this most fairly and efficiently, in large part by raising taxation levels and procuring health services (through, for instance, Medicare). Conservatives believe that the private sector is the best way to do so. But, whatever your position, it's all about the health sector taking up a larger and larger fraction of GDP. There are other places where the author's understanding of economic history is a bit shaky. He claims:
No, it doesn't mean that. It means that there will be fewer farmers, a phenomenon that started with the Industrial Revolution and has been continuing almost without interruption ever since.
I have a Polo GTI. Around the city, you can drive it like an auto; it's not quite as smooth off the line as an auto or a well-driven manual, but it's fine. At any other time, it shifts faster and more smoothly than I could hope to manage. Its auto modes (normal and sport) are very good; paddle shifting is fun but almost redundant, in sports mode it's in pretty much the gear you want all the time.
One of the problems with this argument is it ignores the very simple concept of "opportunity cost". That is, what else could we have done with the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the space program over the last few decades? If it's commercially useful technologies you want, for instance, I strongly suspect you'd get a whole lot more of them by simply giving the National Science Foundation a whole lot more money to fund scientific research, rather than funding the development of technologies specifically related to space flight, only a small fraction of which will find commercial applicability elsewhere. Space science and engineering, particularly that relating to crewed missions, should be funded or not funded on its own merits, rather than relying on arguments about better toasters and pacemaker batteries. They're a useful bonus, and advocates should treat them as such.
...and every investment adviser in the world would tell him to diversify his assets.
He takes 5% of his current net worth and sticks it in a global property portfolio, another 5% in an index fund, and maybe 2% in cash and other liquid assets, and even if Facebook dies tomorrow he's still an extraordinarily rich man.
For that matter, the Winklevoss twins are also extraordinarily rich, and will remain so.
I'm not so impressed with the "world's fastest computer" schtick. Take a CPU/GPU with more cores, add a couple of cabinets, and there you go - world's fastest computer (with all due respect to the hardware engineers who put these things together).
The tricky part is figuring out how to divide your particular problem up so you can actually keep those 100,000-odd cores working, not waiting for intermediate results from other cores.
And if you thin it's difficult now, in ten years from now the world's fastest supercomputer will probably have something in the order of a billion (thousand million) cores.
But then again, your average PC (or smartphone) may well have hundreds of CPU cores on it, and today's average CS student won't have a clue how to take advantage of that architecture.
After teaching programming for a while now, it's my very strong suspicion that far more performance bottlenecks are caused by programmers who don't even understand what time and space complexity is, than are caused by competent programmers implementing in one language over another.
For instance, I just set a scripting assignment (to be completed in bash 3.0, which lacks associative arrays) which asked students to process syslog files and report how many times different applications appeared in the logs. Some students did this by repeatedly using grep and wc over the entire log file, and wondered why I deducted marks when it took a minute to run on moderately large logs.
God help anyone who uses a program they've written.
...was stop running Microsoft.
History is littered with wildly successful startup companies turning into boring ones. It happened to Xerox. It happened to Apple. It happened to Microsoft. And it will happen to Google and Facebook too, to pick the current companies of the moment.
Gates was, I think, smart enough to realize this and found something more exciting to do with his time than run a boring office products company.
The GDP of the United States is around 14.5 trillion dollars. Taking an average historical growth rate of 3.2% per year, the cumulative GDP of the US from 2011 to 2050 is 1144 trillion dollars.
Therefore, your supposedly preposterous cost represents around 10% of GDP over the period.
In any case, your numbers are an exaggeration even in 2011, and you'd have to be horribly pessimistic to assume the costs of wind turbines and solar energy aren't going to drop over that period. For one thing, the current commodity price spike can't last forever.
Even ignoring thorium for the moment, the uranium supply for breeder reactors is inexhaustible by any sensible definition.
You can extract uranium from seawater, in principle. The only real question is the cost. However, with breeder reactors the fuel cost is essentially irrelevant, so this is no barrier.
Enough uranium is added to the ocean every year (by eroding land dissolving) to more than meet any conceivable level of energy demand, if it was burned in a breeder reactor.
It's not a perpetual motion machine in the theoretical sense, but we can continue to run our society using breeder reactors until the sun becomes a red giant and vapourizes the oceans.
Nobody seems to be paying attention to Wikileaks' true motives.
Aside from Assange liking the attention, he has written before about his desire to end the practice of government secrecy. While I happen to think there is far too much government secrecy, I don't subscribe to his radical transparency agenda he espouses.
As such, his primary interest is not so much the specific content of the leaks and their geopolitical implications, more that they are kept secret by governments.