Sure... in your world. In my world they worry about mushrooms, wild boar eating mushrooms, deer eating mushrooms, humans eating mushrooms, deer and wild boar... oops, and that Caesium.
No. Only the mushrooms are a problem to eat. They are building their structure with Cs-137. The deer pisses out the Cs-137 just like the other isotopes of Cs they consume normally when eating mushrooms. This isn't DDT we are talking about. Heavy metals just don't work the same way as organic molecules. If they did they would be part of organic chemistry. You know, there are enough problems in the world without inventing new ones that don't exist.
Your link is paywalled and we can only read the abstract. And since fish, shrimp and things people eat don't use Cesium to build their body structure, they won't accumulate heavy metals over time. Cesium, like Strontium, is a heavy metal and won't combine with carbon or participate in other biological reactions. That's why most experts worry about Iodine and not Cesium or Strontium when evaluating the risk of bio-accumulation of medium lived fission products. But Iodine's isotopes are harder to detect than Cesium's which is why you see these articles about Cesium. The fact we can detect it at all says more about the sensitivity of our instruments than risk to the environment. They are measuring a difference of 0.4 atomic events per volume of seawater! Remember the conversion factor there is on the order of 10^22!
A smartphone developed by Oracle?
I've been fortunate enough never to have crossed paths with Oracle's infamous licensing terms, but I could picture it now:
Every time you used your phone for any purpose whatsoever, you'd have to pay a fee to Oracle.
This was my first thought also. WTF would by an Oracle phone? Google, for all their faults, at least provides some value. Oracle is just a douchey company with little redeeming value at all.
Hahahahahaha, no...If I want my data lost and my queries to fail, I look to Google. If I actually want performance and accuracy of the result, then I use Postgres or Oracle. Google is a good search engine and once upon a time they made great software. 2008 was a long time ago and almost everything coming out of Google these days is crap. As bad as dealing with Oracle business folk is, at least I won't get hung out to dry by their software (well maybe but far less than with Google). Something I absolutely can't say of Google who seems to be trying to prove that HP isn't the worst possible software vendor.
Exactly. It's funny because it's a repeat of the battle over Java vs J++ over 20 years ago.
Its not. MS was making an intentionally incompatible version of Java. Google wasn't trying to do and didn't do that. This is about Google not being able to follow basic legal advice. Its also a pretty damning indictment of problem's in Google's management as this is caused by simple ego and not some complex legal trip up.
Google copied the interface specification, wrote its entirely own implementation, and made it quite clear that it was NOT Java; but rather had a high degree of compatibility with certain parts of Java.
These cases could hardly be any more different. They are nearly polar opposites.
Given that, Google was really stupid about the whole thing. It should have started with the GPL'd Java, stripped out the parts not wanted for Android, then GPL'd the whole thing. Tada! A clean and completely unassailable (through copyright) Android. Plus many millions of litigation dollars saved.
That's not strictly true. Google did more than that. They copied much more than just the interfaces. Then all they had to do is NOT remove Oracle's name from the source code. Somehow that's the one thing that Google did. The secondary issues here are big but the core issue is one of utter stupidity (and seemingly ego) on Google's part. Other companies do this all the time without violating the license of the original code. Somehow, Google was unable to do that and scrubbed out Oracle's name everywhere and removed the Oracle license files. If they hadn't done that, this case either wouldn't exist or would be a very different case that Google probably would have won. I expect the courts to do what they usually do when they don't understand an issue. They will issue a very narrow ruling in Oracle's favor covering just own Google's stupidity and refuse to rule on all the other important secondary issues like can interfaces be copyrighted. And legal nerds will be disappointed but that's normal...
The issue here is that the demand for electricity increased by a large percentage in the US, China and India. Obviously something has to ramp up to meet those demands. In the US that was primarily natural gas, the usage of which increased by 10% in 2018. China is using coal to meet their increased power demands.
Demand increases because population continues to increase. But not by 10%. And the economy doesn't grow that fast. The hidden factor here is keeping the natural gas plants spinning to backup renewables. This isn't a 1 year trend. In CA, CO2 emissions have increased during the last decade, a period where we deployed a large amount of solar and wind. When you have intermittent power sources, you either need storage or you keep a running backup. For CA and most of the US, that's natural gas. The large deployments of wind and solar have much to do with the increase in CO2 emissions but its easier to just blame a cold snap that occurred in 2019? 2018 wasn't that cold and weather certainly wouldn't account for a 10% increase in total usage for the entire year. Residential heating just isn't that large a part of the overall energy usage. A change that big has to be due to changes on the supply side and not on the demand side.
Wow, I agree with you, that's a first. Just one nit. Its Iodine, not Cesium that the body is hungry for. That's why foods with Iodine are always recommended for nuclear war style bunkers. Its also why during Chernobyl, mothers were giving Iodine to their children. Cesium also can bio-accumulate but the body doesn't use Cesium normally so it doesn't tend to accumulate in human (or animal) tissues without constant exposure. Its the accumulation in plants and especially fungi that we worry about, hence the mushroom ban. Fortunately, not many organisms can tolerate much Cesium (its a nasty heavy metal in the first place) anyway so its the rare living thing that bio-accumulates Cs-137.
Well, there are two challenges. One is storing the stuff permanently, but the other is transporting the waste and putting it into the permanent storage. Much of the opposition to facilities like Yucca Mountain have been around the transportation issue. That's what they can celebrate having demonstrated success with now.
There are nuclear flasks (which we've had for decades) which can withstand any abuse. "For a second test the same flask was fitted with a new lid, filled again with steel bars and water before a train was driven into it at high speed. The flask survived with only cosmetic damage while the train was destroyed." Read that again, we parked this thing on a railroad crossing and drove a train at full speed into it and the flask only has cosmetic damage, while the train was destroyed. Is that safe enough for you? We have solved these engineering problems to any reasonable degree of certainty. This is about obstructionism, not reasonable objections.
The key difference is that the maximum damage that a solar panel can do is known. It can fall on people, it can get blown around and smash stuff up, same as lots of other solar panel sized things we deal with all the time.
Even with as poor a job as we do with nuclear currently (according to you), solar and wind still kill far more people than nuclear per amount of power produced. But don't let facts get in your way. Also, I'm sure one of your unicorn technologies will come by eventually to save us all before climate change does us in. We don't need to use a technology we already understand and can scale to replace fossil fuels. Also, nuclear from 70 years ago is the best we can ever do and we should never do research into newer reactors. Have I understood your position?
We're not talking about Pu (which isn't all that dangerous unless you eat it or use it in a nuke) as much as other other more highly radioactive elements like Sr-90 and Cs-137. Half life about 30 years, but even after 10 half lives, there's likely enough to deliver a lethal dose to anyone near the waste. Plus even short-lived isotopes decay to other radioisotopes.
False, 10 half-lives is usually the standard for when sometime is "safe" again. At 10 half-lives the radiation is 1/1024th of the original amount. Cs-137 produces a lot of radiation but it isn't particularly penetrating type of radiation. It can be safely stored in a normal 55-gallon drum as it is a beta emitter and not a gamma emitter. Its nasty stuff but "lethal" doses of its radiation don't last forever. Also, "lethal" isn't a standard is ionizating radiation, radiation just isn't that simple.
You need both: waste storage and reprocessing. Some contaminants are also highly radioactive (like Sr-90 and Cs-137), but aren't terribly useful in a reactor. Yeah, yeah, you can use Sr-90 in a radiothermal generator, but it isn't terribly safe or economical to do so.
You don't need reprocessing if you burn it all up during the first cycle like in a Thorium reactor. Also, neither Sr-90 or Cs-137 last longer than 300 years so storage is a realistic option for those medium lived fission products.
The unjustifiable cost is the judicial stonewalling and the CO2 emissions. Nuclear is the only power source that has a clean up reserve required, and more than 2/3 of the cosy of nuclear is malicious judicial and regulatory delays. Not oversight and good design requirements, just the malicious delays.
Mod parent up. Nuclear is expensive because we are forced to use old inefficient designs and NIMBYists make licensing the plants insanely expensive. Its also the only energy technology that scales. So our choices our fossil fuels or nuclear. Unicorns don't exist...
A nuclear reactor "Burns" radiation to run a steam engine. Dumping radioactive waste in the ground is dumping fuel in the ground. Use fuel reprossessing to remove the contaminants that prevent it working in a normal reactor and re-use it as new fuel. We have the technology to permanenly and safely dispose of all radioactive isotopes, it just costs more than dumping.
That's not accurate. The 93% of the heat in a reactor is from fission and not from radioactive decay as you state. And the issues raised about fuel reprocessing aren't about cost either. Its about nuclear proliferation risks.
The worry is that during the reprocessing, someone will steal pure fissionable produce from the reprocessing station. Now, often that requires a nation-state level of industrial facilities to process the fissionable material from the unused fuel and fission products. The problem is that the same purification systems used in reprocessing can be repurposed and used to enrich fissionable material which is a step in making bombs. The other problem is that nuclear fuel in our current civilian reactors is only 4% used up so there are lots of fissionable isotopes left in the "waste". However, this isn't true for the Th-U fuel cycle and Thorium reactors wouldn't have this issue as they burn up 96% of their fissionable material and their waste stream doesn't have enough fissionable material left to make weapons.
It would be easier to start with natural Uranium ore than the waste from a Thorium reactor.
When a reactor operates, it fissions the fuel and creates fission products. Based upon the fuel cycle and energy of the neutrons in the reactor (and other factors), you can calculate what fission products are created. The fission products are the waste and will decay on a specific period. Reactors with lots of Pu will make waste that takes as long as 10,000 to decay to natural levels of radiation (at which point its "safe"). Reactors with lots of U-233 (Thorium breeders) make waste that lasts *only* 300 years. Thorium reactors burn up 96% of their nuclear fuel leaving very little fissionable material in the waste stream making reprocessing of this material safe in comparison with the reprocessing that happens with a current generation U-Pu reactor.
Since the opposition has come into power, though, each of those has sent hundreds of FOIA requests, in just two years. Be the end of Trump's first term, each of the 8 listed will have passed 1000 FOIA requests to just the EPA - a rate of "investigation" almost 40 times higher than just a few years ago.
But Trump is corrupt. Right.
Why not both? One doesn't negate the other in any way.
He's popular because he tells incels what they want to hear: it's not your fault, you really are owed sex and it's wrong for the world to deny it to you.
Then some vague stuff about promoting monogamy that he refuses to be pinned down on but basically means making women desperate to get a man, any man, and then never leave him.
Basically he's telling young guys that hot girls should dedicate themselves to pleasing them sexually. No wonder he's popular.
He says nothing of the sort. When you spout such obviously slanted things you are just as bad as those that promote conspiracy theories. You are just creating the environment that creates conspiracy theorists. You don't like what he says, fine. But disagree with what he says instead of the very slanted image painted of him by some media members with an agenda (they are even worse than you). The reason for this is you can simply google for his videos. If you view them, you get a very different sense of the ideas he is promoting than your cartoonish image of him. Its so far away from the image you just painted that the thought in their brain is, "they are lying about this guy, what else are they lying about". And that creates the environment for ever more absurd and impossible conspiracies in that person's mind. So now, we have taken an otherwise rational person and presented a series of experiences designed to create distrust in institutions and the media. Now that that's been accomplished, the sky is now the limit. All sorts of clearly wrong theories can be implanted in their head and they will stick and be very difficult to disprove. So just stick to the facts and realistic and fair descriptions of public figures. Otherwise you are just playing into those that seek to radicalize others for their own gain.
So you're saying that in the 50's the R's were already on the path of becoming flaming assholes? Sounds about right. Steady de-evolution of the platform and corruption of their ideals ever since? Check, makes sense.
The end of McCarthyism was at the same time as the start of the D's being for civil rights of people over corporations, but had nothing to do with it. Lean some history, dumbfuck.
So what about FDR? 0 for 2. You are just wrong and whoever told you this either is an idiot or such a ideologue that you should stop taking them seriously. SJWs are not that important historically speaking, just quit while you are ahead.
Also, most ML algorithms of this type produce a continuous score and not a binary Yes/No classification. Human users/customers provide a score cutoff that gives an acceptable confusion matrix for their use case.
Alternatively stated, the machine does not say "Bob is lying", rather, "I think Bob is lying with X confidence".
You are confusing Regression with Classification. Classification produces a yes/no, choice A/B/C type answer. Regression produces a number or set of numbers often in a given range. You can turn a Regression system into a classifier with a simple cutoff but not vis-versa. Its common that ML algorithm implementions come in a Classification and Regression flavors. Also, getting a confidence interval out of a ML algorithm is possible but really difficult and of potentially questionable use. Its more honest to just list the overall error rate of the algorithm next to the prediction.
Ronald Reagan is a Democrat? First I've heard that.
Oh, by 150+ years ago you mean "Before the parties changed positions in the 1960s with regard to civil rights". Gotcha.
They switched in the 20's and 30's due to Prohibition and the Great Depression. Who told you it was in the 60's? Let me introduce you to Senator McCarthy of the 1950's Republican Party.
What about the human side of lie detection? Can it tell if a person is mistaken instead of lying? What about an accomplish con man that can lie convincingly? Or my mother who genuinely believes the stories she makes up? What about a white lies, where the intent it is be polite not deceive? What about propaganda and campaign promises where what is said has no bearing on anything really? What if a statement is only partially a lie? What if a statement, while completely true, is misleading, like lying by omission?
That's all 'irreducible error'...aka the real world...aka gray area...aka it depends
All ML algorithms have an error rate. Its baked into the design. ML researchers talk about error rate all the time. There is even a term, 'irreducible error' in ML that refers to data points that can never be classified correctly by a specific algorithm. Its a mistake to completely trust what a computer database tells you because the wrong data could have been input or bugs could have changed that data in a weird way. Its all those risks plus the error that comes from the ML algorithm. The way to get around this is to have multiple algorithms "vote" but even then there is still an error rate. The error rate can be double digit % or lower than 1% but its always there. And all of this is on top of the risk of bad data just like a DB gives you. Garbage in/garbage out is a real principle. Trusting this stuff is tricky but the bar isn't perfection. Its better than a skilled human. And since I don't really trust a "skilled human" in lie detection, why on earth would I trust a ML algorithm that at best is only marginally better than that and could be far worse.
The rich don't spend? Who bought Trump's 757? A rich guy, Donald Trump. Who bought John Travolta's 737? A rich guy, John Travolta. Then there is rich guy Nkck Cage that was, at his height, spending every cent he made. Michael Jackson spent more than he made, and the only reason for his involvement in the tour he was planning was to pay the bills. The rich mostly spend out the wazoo - that's who buys the Ferrarris and the Rolls Royces and such. Sure, there are some that will decide not to be taxed, and not buy a lot, and that's their right, but the point of being rich is enjoying your success, and so they spend.
The plural of antidote isn't data. And the spending of Hollywood actors is hardly representative of the rich. The fact that you think so just shows how out of your depth you are here. The rich do NOT spend in proportion to their income. If you make 50x the normal income do you spend 50x more for your clothes, your house, your car, and every other expense in your life? No. You spend more sure but not the entire amount, not by a long shot. Also, if you are making that amount, you have already met all your needs and you are only spending on whims. People that inherit, win or otherwise receive money they haven't earned usually spend on whims, not those that make it. And even when they do, they still probably don't spend in proportion to their wealth relative to the average person. This is why we get asset bubbles. When there is an asset bubble, its a good sign that income for the highest brackets are too high in proportion to median income. The solution is usually increasing taxes for the highest bracket without increasing deductions but that's the worst solution and there are others.
Its a bit less than 2-sigma. It should be more like 3-sigma (about p=0.01) which would make p-hacking much more difficult as it would take 100 variations to see a probable null hypothesis. Although the exact methods of conversion are complex.
The way to raise taxes on the rich is to pass the consumption tax, because... the rich consume like hell, and consumption taxes are harder to evade, you have to go beyond simply 1 person lying about their income, to 2 people, the buyer and the seller, both putting themselves at risk for prison on a conspiracy charge, to avoid a consumption tax. The seller, BTW, gets nothing out of such a scheme except that risk of prison.
That's not true. The problem with giving money to rich people is that they don't need it for their daily lives. They already have all the stuff they want. And when they are making 10x, 100x or whatever absurd amount more than the median income, they don't spent it all if they are currently making it. Instead it goes into index funds, bonds, and (often foreign) luxury goods, basically asset bubbles. When you give money to the middle class they usually buy electronics and cars (both exporting to foreign companies or workers) or real estate (creating an asset bubble). When you give money to poor folks it usually goes into the local economy to buy basics. Trickle down economics has been time and time again proved to be false. And a consumption tax would be horribly regressive and since we know trickle down doesn't work, we want to avoid regression taxation. Note: this includes "sin" taxes which are often very regressive.
In CA water usage was about 90% for industry and 10% residential.
California is largely agricultural, mostly using irrigation. How much of that 90% went to watering crops?
It changes from year to year often based upon the amount of rain. For a drought year, the numbers I posted are accurate and Ag would be probably 2/3ish of the total water usage. For a wet year, Ag usage drops some but not as much as you would think. I think my point was more about industrial usage often being so high in comparison with residential usage. I wouldn't be surprised if the UK is surprisingly similar but just with industrial usages taking the place of Ag. But then again, you can google that for yourself if you are so inclined. I'm not your data elf. Perhaps the UK is very different as it does have 5x the population on not much more land than CA. Its pretty scary when your residential usage is taking a large amount of water even in wet years.
A perfect application for solar energy for a place surrounded by ocean... not seeing any real issue here that isn't readily solvable with known tech. And it's not like they have to transition to getting all their water that way, just some percent on the order of a tenth or so
Water desalinization is an energy intensive process. You either have to be in a desert or somewhere power is almost free to make it economical. And if its not economical, with water (not necessarily for other things but for water) that means more environmental damage. Water is heavy and thus expensive to transport unless you have a nice downhill run and a pipeline/aquifer system. Also you need A LOT of water so to do anything of consequence you need huge scale. Of course with nuclear this is possible, but probably not with solar as its not nearly energy dense enough.
On another note, when CA had a water crisis I looked into water usage. In CA water usage was about 90% for industry and 10% residential. Not sure what it is in the UK, but the point being all the conservation by normal folks didn't do a bit of good. It was all about big businesses fighting for control of water sources as they were doing things to convert water into money (mostly growing expensive nuts like Almonds and fracking natural gas). So I would take these warnings with a grain of salt. If you want to manage society-wide water usage, you need to limit industrial usage. And because that's almost all usage, that should fix the problems with long term management. And that has to be more politically palatable than wondering around and reporting your neighbors for watering their lawns.
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Sure ... in your world. In my world they worry about mushrooms, wild boar eating mushrooms, deer eating mushrooms, humans eating mushrooms, deer and wild boar ... oops, and that Caesium.
No. Only the mushrooms are a problem to eat. They are building their structure with Cs-137. The deer pisses out the Cs-137 just like the other isotopes of Cs they consume normally when eating mushrooms. This isn't DDT we are talking about. Heavy metals just don't work the same way as organic molecules. If they did they would be part of organic chemistry. You know, there are enough problems in the world without inventing new ones that don't exist.
Perhaps you should stop talking about stuff you have no freaking idea about?
Since when has that ever stopped you.
Your body treats cesium like potassium. It does not bioaccumulate. Your human body, perhaps. No idea. But how is that relevant when your food does?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Your link is paywalled and we can only read the abstract. And since fish, shrimp and things people eat don't use Cesium to build their body structure, they won't accumulate heavy metals over time. Cesium, like Strontium, is a heavy metal and won't combine with carbon or participate in other biological reactions. That's why most experts worry about Iodine and not Cesium or Strontium when evaluating the risk of bio-accumulation of medium lived fission products. But Iodine's isotopes are harder to detect than Cesium's which is why you see these articles about Cesium. The fact we can detect it at all says more about the sensitivity of our instruments than risk to the environment. They are measuring a difference of 0.4 atomic events per volume of seawater! Remember the conversion factor there is on the order of 10^22!
A smartphone developed by Oracle? I've been fortunate enough never to have crossed paths with Oracle's infamous licensing terms, but I could picture it now:
Every time you used your phone for any purpose whatsoever, you'd have to pay a fee to Oracle.
This was my first thought also. WTF would by an Oracle phone? Google, for all their faults, at least provides some value. Oracle is just a douchey company with little redeeming value at all.
Hahahahahaha, no...If I want my data lost and my queries to fail, I look to Google. If I actually want performance and accuracy of the result, then I use Postgres or Oracle. Google is a good search engine and once upon a time they made great software. 2008 was a long time ago and almost everything coming out of Google these days is crap. As bad as dealing with Oracle business folk is, at least I won't get hung out to dry by their software (well maybe but far less than with Google). Something I absolutely can't say of Google who seems to be trying to prove that HP isn't the worst possible software vendor.
Exactly. It's funny because it's a repeat of the battle over Java vs J++ over 20 years ago.
Its not. MS was making an intentionally incompatible version of Java. Google wasn't trying to do and didn't do that. This is about Google not being able to follow basic legal advice. Its also a pretty damning indictment of problem's in Google's management as this is caused by simple ego and not some complex legal trip up.
Google copied the interface specification, wrote its entirely own implementation, and made it quite clear that it was NOT Java; but rather had a high degree of compatibility with certain parts of Java.
These cases could hardly be any more different. They are nearly polar opposites.
Given that, Google was really stupid about the whole thing. It should have started with the GPL'd Java, stripped out the parts not wanted for Android, then GPL'd the whole thing. Tada! A clean and completely unassailable (through copyright) Android. Plus many millions of litigation dollars saved.
That's not strictly true. Google did more than that. They copied much more than just the interfaces. Then all they had to do is NOT remove Oracle's name from the source code. Somehow that's the one thing that Google did. The secondary issues here are big but the core issue is one of utter stupidity (and seemingly ego) on Google's part. Other companies do this all the time without violating the license of the original code. Somehow, Google was unable to do that and scrubbed out Oracle's name everywhere and removed the Oracle license files. If they hadn't done that, this case either wouldn't exist or would be a very different case that Google probably would have won. I expect the courts to do what they usually do when they don't understand an issue. They will issue a very narrow ruling in Oracle's favor covering just own Google's stupidity and refuse to rule on all the other important secondary issues like can interfaces be copyrighted. And legal nerds will be disappointed but that's normal...
The issue here is that the demand for electricity increased by a large percentage in the US, China and India. Obviously something has to ramp up to meet those demands. In the US that was primarily natural gas, the usage of which increased by 10% in 2018. China is using coal to meet their increased power demands.
Demand increases because population continues to increase. But not by 10%. And the economy doesn't grow that fast. The hidden factor here is keeping the natural gas plants spinning to backup renewables. This isn't a 1 year trend. In CA, CO2 emissions have increased during the last decade, a period where we deployed a large amount of solar and wind. When you have intermittent power sources, you either need storage or you keep a running backup. For CA and most of the US, that's natural gas. The large deployments of wind and solar have much to do with the increase in CO2 emissions but its easier to just blame a cold snap that occurred in 2019? 2018 wasn't that cold and weather certainly wouldn't account for a 10% increase in total usage for the entire year. Residential heating just isn't that large a part of the overall energy usage. A change that big has to be due to changes on the supply side and not on the demand side.
Wow, I agree with you, that's a first. Just one nit. Its Iodine, not Cesium that the body is hungry for. That's why foods with Iodine are always recommended for nuclear war style bunkers. Its also why during Chernobyl, mothers were giving Iodine to their children. Cesium also can bio-accumulate but the body doesn't use Cesium normally so it doesn't tend to accumulate in human (or animal) tissues without constant exposure. Its the accumulation in plants and especially fungi that we worry about, hence the mushroom ban. Fortunately, not many organisms can tolerate much Cesium (its a nasty heavy metal in the first place) anyway so its the rare living thing that bio-accumulates Cs-137.
Well, there are two challenges. One is storing the stuff permanently, but the other is transporting the waste and putting it into the permanent storage. Much of the opposition to facilities like Yucca Mountain have been around the transportation issue. That's what they can celebrate having demonstrated success with now.
There are nuclear flasks (which we've had for decades) which can withstand any abuse. "For a second test the same flask was fitted with a new lid, filled again with steel bars and water before a train was driven into it at high speed. The flask survived with only cosmetic damage while the train was destroyed." Read that again, we parked this thing on a railroad crossing and drove a train at full speed into it and the flask only has cosmetic damage, while the train was destroyed. Is that safe enough for you? We have solved these engineering problems to any reasonable degree of certainty. This is about obstructionism, not reasonable objections.
The key difference is that the maximum damage that a solar panel can do is known. It can fall on people, it can get blown around and smash stuff up, same as lots of other solar panel sized things we deal with all the time.
Even with as poor a job as we do with nuclear currently (according to you), solar and wind still kill far more people than nuclear per amount of power produced. But don't let facts get in your way. Also, I'm sure one of your unicorn technologies will come by eventually to save us all before climate change does us in. We don't need to use a technology we already understand and can scale to replace fossil fuels. Also, nuclear from 70 years ago is the best we can ever do and we should never do research into newer reactors. Have I understood your position?
We're not talking about Pu (which isn't all that dangerous unless you eat it or use it in a nuke) as much as other other more highly radioactive elements like Sr-90 and Cs-137. Half life about 30 years, but even after 10 half lives, there's likely enough to deliver a lethal dose to anyone near the waste. Plus even short-lived isotopes decay to other radioisotopes.
False, 10 half-lives is usually the standard for when sometime is "safe" again. At 10 half-lives the radiation is 1/1024th of the original amount. Cs-137 produces a lot of radiation but it isn't particularly penetrating type of radiation. It can be safely stored in a normal 55-gallon drum as it is a beta emitter and not a gamma emitter. Its nasty stuff but "lethal" doses of its radiation don't last forever. Also, "lethal" isn't a standard is ionizating radiation, radiation just isn't that simple.
You need both: waste storage and reprocessing. Some contaminants are also highly radioactive (like Sr-90 and Cs-137), but aren't terribly useful in a reactor. Yeah, yeah, you can use Sr-90 in a radiothermal generator, but it isn't terribly safe or economical to do so.
You don't need reprocessing if you burn it all up during the first cycle like in a Thorium reactor. Also, neither Sr-90 or Cs-137 last longer than 300 years so storage is a realistic option for those medium lived fission products.
The unjustifiable cost is the judicial stonewalling and the CO2 emissions. Nuclear is the only power source that has a clean up reserve required, and more than 2/3 of the cosy of nuclear is malicious judicial and regulatory delays. Not oversight and good design requirements, just the malicious delays.
Mod parent up. Nuclear is expensive because we are forced to use old inefficient designs and NIMBYists make licensing the plants insanely expensive. Its also the only energy technology that scales. So our choices our fossil fuels or nuclear. Unicorns don't exist...
A nuclear reactor "Burns" radiation to run a steam engine. Dumping radioactive waste in the ground is dumping fuel in the ground. Use fuel reprossessing to remove the contaminants that prevent it working in a normal reactor and re-use it as new fuel. We have the technology to permanenly and safely dispose of all radioactive isotopes, it just costs more than dumping.
That's not accurate. The 93% of the heat in a reactor is from fission and not from radioactive decay as you state. And the issues raised about fuel reprocessing aren't about cost either. Its about nuclear proliferation risks.
The worry is that during the reprocessing, someone will steal pure fissionable produce from the reprocessing station. Now, often that requires a nation-state level of industrial facilities to process the fissionable material from the unused fuel and fission products. The problem is that the same purification systems used in reprocessing can be repurposed and used to enrich fissionable material which is a step in making bombs. The other problem is that nuclear fuel in our current civilian reactors is only 4% used up so there are lots of fissionable isotopes left in the "waste". However, this isn't true for the Th-U fuel cycle and Thorium reactors wouldn't have this issue as they burn up 96% of their fissionable material and their waste stream doesn't have enough fissionable material left to make weapons. It would be easier to start with natural Uranium ore than the waste from a Thorium reactor.
When a reactor operates, it fissions the fuel and creates fission products. Based upon the fuel cycle and energy of the neutrons in the reactor (and other factors), you can calculate what fission products are created. The fission products are the waste and will decay on a specific period. Reactors with lots of Pu will make waste that takes as long as 10,000 to decay to natural levels of radiation (at which point its "safe"). Reactors with lots of U-233 (Thorium breeders) make waste that lasts *only* 300 years. Thorium reactors burn up 96% of their nuclear fuel leaving very little fissionable material in the waste stream making reprocessing of this material safe in comparison with the reprocessing that happens with a current generation U-Pu reactor.
Since the opposition has come into power, though, each of those has sent hundreds of FOIA requests, in just two years. Be the end of Trump's first term, each of the 8 listed will have passed 1000 FOIA requests to just the EPA - a rate of "investigation" almost 40 times higher than just a few years ago.
But Trump is corrupt. Right.
Why not both? One doesn't negate the other in any way.
He's popular because he tells incels what they want to hear: it's not your fault, you really are owed sex and it's wrong for the world to deny it to you.
Then some vague stuff about promoting monogamy that he refuses to be pinned down on but basically means making women desperate to get a man, any man, and then never leave him.
Basically he's telling young guys that hot girls should dedicate themselves to pleasing them sexually. No wonder he's popular.
He says nothing of the sort. When you spout such obviously slanted things you are just as bad as those that promote conspiracy theories. You are just creating the environment that creates conspiracy theorists. You don't like what he says, fine. But disagree with what he says instead of the very slanted image painted of him by some media members with an agenda (they are even worse than you). The reason for this is you can simply google for his videos. If you view them, you get a very different sense of the ideas he is promoting than your cartoonish image of him. Its so far away from the image you just painted that the thought in their brain is, "they are lying about this guy, what else are they lying about". And that creates the environment for ever more absurd and impossible conspiracies in that person's mind. So now, we have taken an otherwise rational person and presented a series of experiences designed to create distrust in institutions and the media. Now that that's been accomplished, the sky is now the limit. All sorts of clearly wrong theories can be implanted in their head and they will stick and be very difficult to disprove. So just stick to the facts and realistic and fair descriptions of public figures. Otherwise you are just playing into those that seek to radicalize others for their own gain.
So you're saying that in the 50's the R's were already on the path of becoming flaming assholes? Sounds about right. Steady de-evolution of the platform and corruption of their ideals ever since? Check, makes sense.
The end of McCarthyism was at the same time as the start of the D's being for civil rights of people over corporations, but had nothing to do with it. Lean some history, dumbfuck.
So what about FDR? 0 for 2. You are just wrong and whoever told you this either is an idiot or such a ideologue that you should stop taking them seriously. SJWs are not that important historically speaking, just quit while you are ahead.
Also, most ML algorithms of this type produce a continuous score and not a binary Yes/No classification. Human users/customers provide a score cutoff that gives an acceptable confusion matrix for their use case.
Alternatively stated, the machine does not say "Bob is lying", rather, "I think Bob is lying with X confidence".
You are confusing Regression with Classification. Classification produces a yes/no, choice A/B/C type answer. Regression produces a number or set of numbers often in a given range. You can turn a Regression system into a classifier with a simple cutoff but not vis-versa. Its common that ML algorithm implementions come in a Classification and Regression flavors. Also, getting a confidence interval out of a ML algorithm is possible but really difficult and of potentially questionable use. Its more honest to just list the overall error rate of the algorithm next to the prediction.
Ronald Reagan is a Democrat? First I've heard that.
Oh, by 150+ years ago you mean "Before the parties changed positions in the 1960s with regard to civil rights". Gotcha.
They switched in the 20's and 30's due to Prohibition and the Great Depression. Who told you it was in the 60's? Let me introduce you to Senator McCarthy of the 1950's Republican Party.
What about the human side of lie detection? Can it tell if a person is mistaken instead of lying? What about an accomplish con man that can lie convincingly? Or my mother who genuinely believes the stories she makes up? What about a white lies, where the intent it is be polite not deceive? What about propaganda and campaign promises where what is said has no bearing on anything really? What if a statement is only partially a lie? What if a statement, while completely true, is misleading, like lying by omission?
That's all 'irreducible error'...aka the real world...aka gray area...aka it depends
All ML algorithms have an error rate. Its baked into the design. ML researchers talk about error rate all the time. There is even a term, 'irreducible error' in ML that refers to data points that can never be classified correctly by a specific algorithm. Its a mistake to completely trust what a computer database tells you because the wrong data could have been input or bugs could have changed that data in a weird way. Its all those risks plus the error that comes from the ML algorithm. The way to get around this is to have multiple algorithms "vote" but even then there is still an error rate. The error rate can be double digit % or lower than 1% but its always there. And all of this is on top of the risk of bad data just like a DB gives you. Garbage in/garbage out is a real principle. Trusting this stuff is tricky but the bar isn't perfection. Its better than a skilled human. And since I don't really trust a "skilled human" in lie detection, why on earth would I trust a ML algorithm that at best is only marginally better than that and could be far worse.
The rich don't spend? Who bought Trump's 757? A rich guy, Donald Trump. Who bought John Travolta's 737? A rich guy, John Travolta. Then there is rich guy Nkck Cage that was, at his height, spending every cent he made. Michael Jackson spent more than he made, and the only reason for his involvement in the tour he was planning was to pay the bills. The rich mostly spend out the wazoo - that's who buys the Ferrarris and the Rolls Royces and such. Sure, there are some that will decide not to be taxed, and not buy a lot, and that's their right, but the point of being rich is enjoying your success, and so they spend.
The plural of antidote isn't data. And the spending of Hollywood actors is hardly representative of the rich. The fact that you think so just shows how out of your depth you are here. The rich do NOT spend in proportion to their income. If you make 50x the normal income do you spend 50x more for your clothes, your house, your car, and every other expense in your life? No. You spend more sure but not the entire amount, not by a long shot. Also, if you are making that amount, you have already met all your needs and you are only spending on whims. People that inherit, win or otherwise receive money they haven't earned usually spend on whims, not those that make it. And even when they do, they still probably don't spend in proportion to their wealth relative to the average person. This is why we get asset bubbles. When there is an asset bubble, its a good sign that income for the highest brackets are too high in proportion to median income. The solution is usually increasing taxes for the highest bracket without increasing deductions but that's the worst solution and there are others.
(BTW: Isn't p=0.05 only a 2-sigma result? Ick.)
Its a bit less than 2-sigma. It should be more like 3-sigma (about p=0.01) which would make p-hacking much more difficult as it would take 100 variations to see a probable null hypothesis. Although the exact methods of conversion are complex.
The way to raise taxes on the rich is to pass the consumption tax, because... the rich consume like hell, and consumption taxes are harder to evade, you have to go beyond simply 1 person lying about their income, to 2 people, the buyer and the seller, both putting themselves at risk for prison on a conspiracy charge, to avoid a consumption tax. The seller, BTW, gets nothing out of such a scheme except that risk of prison.
That's not true. The problem with giving money to rich people is that they don't need it for their daily lives. They already have all the stuff they want. And when they are making 10x, 100x or whatever absurd amount more than the median income, they don't spent it all if they are currently making it. Instead it goes into index funds, bonds, and (often foreign) luxury goods, basically asset bubbles. When you give money to the middle class they usually buy electronics and cars (both exporting to foreign companies or workers) or real estate (creating an asset bubble). When you give money to poor folks it usually goes into the local economy to buy basics. Trickle down economics has been time and time again proved to be false. And a consumption tax would be horribly regressive and since we know trickle down doesn't work, we want to avoid regression taxation. Note: this includes "sin" taxes which are often very regressive.
In CA water usage was about 90% for industry and 10% residential. California is largely agricultural, mostly using irrigation. How much of that 90% went to watering crops?
It changes from year to year often based upon the amount of rain. For a drought year, the numbers I posted are accurate and Ag would be probably 2/3ish of the total water usage. For a wet year, Ag usage drops some but not as much as you would think. I think my point was more about industrial usage often being so high in comparison with residential usage. I wouldn't be surprised if the UK is surprisingly similar but just with industrial usages taking the place of Ag. But then again, you can google that for yourself if you are so inclined. I'm not your data elf. Perhaps the UK is very different as it does have 5x the population on not much more land than CA. Its pretty scary when your residential usage is taking a large amount of water even in wet years.
A perfect application for solar energy for a place surrounded by ocean... not seeing any real issue here that isn't readily solvable with known tech. And it's not like they have to transition to getting all their water that way, just some percent on the order of a tenth or so
Water desalinization is an energy intensive process. You either have to be in a desert or somewhere power is almost free to make it economical. And if its not economical, with water (not necessarily for other things but for water) that means more environmental damage. Water is heavy and thus expensive to transport unless you have a nice downhill run and a pipeline/aquifer system. Also you need A LOT of water so to do anything of consequence you need huge scale. Of course with nuclear this is possible, but probably not with solar as its not nearly energy dense enough.
On another note, when CA had a water crisis I looked into water usage. In CA water usage was about 90% for industry and 10% residential. Not sure what it is in the UK, but the point being all the conservation by normal folks didn't do a bit of good. It was all about big businesses fighting for control of water sources as they were doing things to convert water into money (mostly growing expensive nuts like Almonds and fracking natural gas). So I would take these warnings with a grain of salt. If you want to manage society-wide water usage, you need to limit industrial usage. And because that's almost all usage, that should fix the problems with long term management. And that has to be more politically palatable than wondering around and reporting your neighbors for watering their lawns.