Yes, a 9.0 earthquake and giant tsunami tend to break things and people, whether nuclear power is involved or not. Our freeways fall apart to a lowly 6.8 quake.
It is physically impossible for you to have developed symptoms of acute radiation sickness in France due to Chernobyl. I also find that 600 mSv exposure figure to be extremely suspicious -- the highest regional I-131 dose equivalent in infants in the US from all of our nuclear testing was 160 mSv and that was far more I-131 than Chernobyl.
I'm not sure where the data in that image you are citing comes from, but please link to the original peer reviewed journal article if there was one.
That is utterly ridiculous. Of course there is radiation in France. There is no place in the universe without radiation. Only around the reactor itself could you be exposed to enough radiation to develop acute radiation sickness. The nosebleeds etc you talk about happen at like 2 Sv+ of exposure. That's crazy amounts of special nuclear materials. France has an extensive national radioactivity monitoring network and the data is publicly accessible. Hundreds of thousands did not develop symptoms, there have been numerous studies on this.
It is a insightful comment, and I agree with you. It sucks, and the Russian people should have better than the status quo. Putin won't get Russia to any sort of ideal. But communism and ultranationalists won't either. They're a step in the wrong direction, and are even worse. You know as well as I do you would see more abuses of power, and less chance of a strong middle class forming.
Replacing Putin, violently or not, is only of benefit if the replacement is better than Putin, and United Russia. When they are worse in every way, it is pointless. Change isn't always a good thing, and killing is a two-way street.
Also, in the US, petroleum and mining jobs are very lucrative, and petroleum and mining engineers are at the upper end of the middle class. Even with corruption present the Russian standard of living and average income has increased significantly under Putin. That's pretty good, considering Putin came into a worse mess than even Obama, and walks a very, very fine line. Putin also did clean up a great deal of corruption and oligarchs from Yeltsin's time; if trying to do so gets you assassinated in Russia, then Putin is a very lucky man to get his tea without polonium.
The alternatives are COMMUNISM and ultranationalists! Those are far, far worse than Putin could ever be. Who cares about voter fraud or some rally on TV? Communism has killed millions upon millions of people, it is an evil that must be opposed, just like the Nazi party. Ultranationalists would drive Russia into war and nuclear armageddon.
Your voting alternative to Putin isn't Obama. It's Stalin. It's a real-life Imran Zakhaev. What do you think your protests and standard of living will look like then? The alternatives to United Russia are so bad you should be absolutely terrified of them losing power. The downfall of communism and ultranationalism is something people have historically thought were worth fighting for. Worth dying for. And you would welcome them with open arms because... some crowd sizes weren't consistently reported on TV? Do you know what your TV would look like if the ultranationalists took over?
As you use DARPA's "amoral" creations like GPS, the internet, and Siri. Remember, every time you use satellite navigation, you support the military-industrial complex! Of course, you can also use GLONASS now simultaneously with the same receiver (on newer models), so you can support the American and Russian military-industrial complexes at the same time. Where does THAT bumper sticker go on your Prius?
The job of the USAF Space Command isn't "fighting wars". It's as they say, "To provide an integrated constellation of space and cyberspace capabilities at the speed of need." In other words, they're the satellite guys.
You might better know them as the sole voice in the US government that stood up to Lightsquared and the FCC's idiot plan that will destroy GPS reception in the US so some politician's buddies can make a quick buck, by massively overloading power output on adjacent frequencies to GPS that bleed into the GPS signal like a compass inside a MRI machine. Perhaps they should have bombed the hell out of someone over that, but so far they've just used words.
Well, we could send teams from USAF Space Command armed with P90s to distant planets with alien technology, and put together a "coalition of the willing" with allies who would defy the malevolent aliens' rule...
Nah, some greedy idiot would probably pull the funding from that and we'd all die. Nevermind.
In this day and age of cuts to the F-22 and F-35 programs, the likelihood of the USAF spending money on "deep space radar telemetry" to check for aliens is practically nil, so I'm not sure why more people weren't skeptical of the misleading summary. Plus, as you know, the Cheyenne Mountain complex got cancelled a couple years back in budget cuts.
One thing that also shouldn't be overlooked is that this bails out SETI's ATA which otherwise would have been shut down due to lack of funding. I think SETI has some fans among the USAF Space Command who don't want to see it die. Maybe the array is useful and cost-effective for scanning for objects in geosynchronous orbit and maybe it isn't, but I think there's more to the fact that the entire thing would've been shut down without Space Command's intervention than mere coincidence.
Ironic, isn't it? It wasn't too long ago that it was the left that was the greatest political threat to Los Alamos and LLNL.
But today, as the article points out, it is the right, mostly starting with the Bush Administration. I'm no fan of people scapegoating George W. Bush for all of the ills of the nation, but here is a case where his administration had a profoundly negative effect upon national security. The same kind of paranoid mismanagement on a gross scale that gives you TSA cavity searches every time you get on a plane is gutting the intellectual and scientific capabilities of these institutions.
It is a further irony that we criticize fundamentalist Muslim nations for impeding the progress of science and technology, but we are allowing this to happen in our own backyard. We owe much of our technology today-- the internet, integrated circuits, a national highway system, GPS, etc to nuclear defense research and spending.
We are told we cannot compete with developing nations for manufacturing, and must do so through science and innovation. But when scientific research and scientists are undermined, then what future do we have?
The failed policies of the Bush administration and Bechtel's seizure of power must be reversed. Nuclear science should be returned to the capable hands of nuclear scientists, not a for-profit corporation that has proven hostile to science and scientists all in the name of short-term profit. Bechtel has acted against the national security interests of the US and is not fit to hold a government contract. The truth is that government-funded science does produce tremendously useful results, and nowhere has that been more apparent than in nuclear defense research. We cannot afford to lose that.
... grasshoppah. If you aren't enjoying coding at your job, or doing any on your own, you're not going to be a good candidate for another employer I'm sorry to say. You and you alone need to have an interest in pushing yourself, learning new things and pursuing what interests you. If that's "nothing, don't care" that's fine but it also means you're never going to enjoy what you do or be especially compelling as a hire.
Even within the confines of developing boring reporting, invoicing etc type business IT solutions you have a lot of leeway in how you meet the specs. If you push hard to optimize things you'll make people pleasantly surprised when things that took minutes now take seconds or less. Being innovative in how you present the data and analyze it with mathematics and statistics can present it in entirely new ways that allow people to see things that they never had before.
The work itself should be the reason you are passionate about it. And a lot of that is in how you personally choose to approach it and your attitude towards it.
Well let's see, there was DARPA that a few years ago made the most efficient solar cell to date, and years of defense research that developed breakthrough after breakthrough for solar power for satellites to provide America with satellite reconnaissance and navigation. Things you use today.
To campaign against these programs that given you technology you use every day and produced real results and scientific achievements, and have allowed America to maintain its technical edge for many years... you wouldn't have anything you'd like to tell us, would you... red?
The same thing happened to Japan's economy years before ours and everyone else's. Do you think Greece would be doing just great if the housing bubble had never burst in the US?
And no, the only thing the US still has left is a DEFENSE industry. IP is easily/cheaply made by anyone anywhere and it is a foolish notion to think Americans are somehow more innovative or creative than anyone else. After all, our "Sputnik moment" was Dr. Wernher von Braun, so I guess Obama was asking us to steal a bunch of scientists from "zee Germans" again?
At this point you're probably thinking, "defense industry? What's the F-22 got to do with anything?" Here's a little example for you: Siri. Siri was a spin-off corporation from SRI acquired by Apple, and SRI was a contractor on DARPA's PAL (personal assistant that learns) project, part of the largest AI project in history. Like so many times before, a corporation took publicly funded defense research as their "innovative" "IP". Oh yeah, they really need protections for "borrowing" the work of DARPA scientists.
Apparently, it's not actually IP until a corporation gets done copying it from DARPA. Then, holy shit! Must be protected at all costs! Oh and here China, build some DARPA technology for us while we wonder where all our jobs went and why we can't seem to stay ahead very long these days. Wait, I know, let's blame China!
Germans came to WWII with experienced soldiers, were machine-gun heavy at a unit level, had panzers, and blitzkrieg. There's pretty much no amount of money you could spend at that time on short-term purchases to stop that juggernaut that was the Wehrmacht, any more than the Wehrmacht could stop the Red Army.
I've got no love for the Red Chinese government, but every government on the planet censors the internet to some degree. Child porn? BRB, FBI. Copyright infringement? I've seen numerous Google notices my search results have been restricted due to that.
In a lot of European countries a copy of Wolfenstein 3-D would get you jail time! (they have to be intolerant, or some people might become intolerant, which cannot be tolerated)
Sure, I can read about Fabul Gong or whatever that dissident group is China seems to get all emo over all the time, but I couldn't care less about that anyway.
I don't see why China gets so butthurt about Tibet either, fact is the Tibetan people were worse off in the harsh caste system before China came along. Their invasion of Tibet was unnecessarily brutal and harsh, but today your average Tibetan is quantifiably better off for it. These are minor, stupid things that China is censoring, that are not so important.
Really, China's reply is actually more something along the lines of "lol wut? Thanks for the money!"
And you know what? China's right. As long as we trip over ourselves to sell out our jobs and technologies to them so an elite few can make a little short-term profit, they can basically do whatever the hell they want. But that's not China's fault-- China has more than earned every dollar we've paid them. We were betrayed from within, and that is where the problem lies.
Wait, what? While I thought doing away with nuclear in the hopes that solar and wind will be economical in the short term and not throw Germany's economy somewhere south of Greece was a bit hopeful, replacing it with coal? Really? Coal?
This isn't even environmentalism. This is just poor, emotional decision making.
Yes, technically coal is "renewable" via long term geological processes but you can breed crazy amounts of fissile material and recycle spent nuclear fuel so that's really not much of an argument.
Japan's new PM also intends to close down all of Japan's fission plants (though I didn't see a timetable) and I'm sort of worried that will just end up making more coal plants as well.
It's not entirely androgen dependent either. It can happen merely with elevated levels of corticosteroids, even in women or with androgen blockade, through activation TLR2 (toll-like receptor 2).
Activation of TLR2 makes you hypersensitive to lipopolysaccharide, which is part of the bacterial cell wall. So your immune system develops hypersensitivity to normal conditions.
I was on prednisone for over a year for autoimmune problems and you can develop some very nasty acne.
The bitch of it is, because prednisone is also an excellent anti-inflammatory, tapering off it makes the acne increase dramatically... because you have both the increased TLR2 activation and increased inflammation.
Russia has pretty extensive experience with rail transportation, including some of the world's deepest subways. I'd go so far as to say Moscow's subway system is the most stunning in the world-- much moreso than the DC Metro or anything in Germany.
FWIW, Russia's subway construction has certainly continued through the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present day. If you want some eye candy, Google for the Cosmonaut Avenue station.
Russia's top exports currently are, iirc, petroleum and minerals, both of which this would facilitate the export of. This could be quite beneficial in lowering or at least helping to stabilize domestic oil prices by giving us high-volume, low-cost access to a very large supply. And distribution from Alaska to the lower 48 is already a solved issue. Russia maintains rail trade with China and again, track gauge switching is something that's already been done for a long time.
And yes, you really can see Russia from Alaska. It's not altogether a bad thing.
Sure, laugh about it now. But when cyber attacks turn into invading Alaska, don't blame me if you didn't prepare by making a giant superpatriot robot and T-51B power armor.
Actually I can assure you that here in the good ol' USA not getting paid on time is pretty common. Even though it's technically illegal and the employer owes you penalty wages. (what are you going to do, sue them? when they have no cash to pay you in the first place?)
Not saying it's as bad as Russia, but I've been hit by it personally more than once.
This is because Russia has a superior and far more efficient form of government than we do.
Head of space appropriations committee... Vladimir Putin
Head of Federal Space Agency... Vladimir Putin
Head of Department of Revenue... Vladimir Putin
Space Agency Oversight Committee... Vladimir Putin
Director of Cosmodrone Development... Vladimir Putin
Soyuz Launch Officer... Vladimir Putin
Cosmonauts No. 1 - 6... Vladimir Putin
Women's Tennis Quality Oversight... Vladimir Putin
And that, comrade, is why Russia won the space race.
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Yes, a 9.0 earthquake and giant tsunami tend to break things and people, whether nuclear power is involved or not. Our freeways fall apart to a lowly 6.8 quake.
Ironically, the very WIkipedia article you link to disputes your claim.
It is physically impossible for you to have developed symptoms of acute radiation sickness in France due to Chernobyl. I also find that 600 mSv exposure figure to be extremely suspicious -- the highest regional I-131 dose equivalent in infants in the US from all of our nuclear testing was 160 mSv and that was far more I-131 than Chernobyl.
I'm not sure where the data in that image you are citing comes from, but please link to the original peer reviewed journal article if there was one.
That is utterly ridiculous. Of course there is radiation in France. There is no place in the universe without radiation. Only around the reactor itself could you be exposed to enough radiation to develop acute radiation sickness. The nosebleeds etc you talk about happen at like 2 Sv+ of exposure. That's crazy amounts of special nuclear materials. France has an extensive national radioactivity monitoring network and the data is publicly accessible. Hundreds of thousands did not develop symptoms, there have been numerous studies on this.
Don't worry, we don't bomb countries with abundant piles of nuclear weapons.
Also, we can't understand why anyone would want nuclear weapons.
It is a insightful comment, and I agree with you. It sucks, and the Russian people should have better than the status quo. Putin won't get Russia to any sort of ideal. But communism and ultranationalists won't either. They're a step in the wrong direction, and are even worse. You know as well as I do you would see more abuses of power, and less chance of a strong middle class forming.
Replacing Putin, violently or not, is only of benefit if the replacement is better than Putin, and United Russia. When they are worse in every way, it is pointless. Change isn't always a good thing, and killing is a two-way street.
Also, in the US, petroleum and mining jobs are very lucrative, and petroleum and mining engineers are at the upper end of the middle class. Even with corruption present the Russian standard of living and average income has increased significantly under Putin. That's pretty good, considering Putin came into a worse mess than even Obama, and walks a very, very fine line. Putin also did clean up a great deal of corruption and oligarchs from Yeltsin's time; if trying to do so gets you assassinated in Russia, then Putin is a very lucky man to get his tea without polonium.
The alternatives are COMMUNISM and ultranationalists! Those are far, far worse than Putin could ever be. Who cares about voter fraud or some rally on TV? Communism has killed millions upon millions of people, it is an evil that must be opposed, just like the Nazi party. Ultranationalists would drive Russia into war and nuclear armageddon.
Your voting alternative to Putin isn't Obama. It's Stalin. It's a real-life Imran Zakhaev. What do you think your protests and standard of living will look like then? The alternatives to United Russia are so bad you should be absolutely terrified of them losing power. The downfall of communism and ultranationalism is something people have historically thought were worth fighting for. Worth dying for. And you would welcome them with open arms because... some crowd sizes weren't consistently reported on TV? Do you know what your TV would look like if the ultranationalists took over?
"And remember... no Russian."
As you use DARPA's "amoral" creations like GPS, the internet, and Siri. Remember, every time you use satellite navigation, you support the military-industrial complex! Of course, you can also use GLONASS now simultaneously with the same receiver (on newer models), so you can support the American and Russian military-industrial complexes at the same time. Where does THAT bumper sticker go on your Prius?
Them thar giant nucular missiles were transferred to US Global Strike Command. It is no longer the responsibility of Space Command.
The job of the USAF Space Command isn't "fighting wars". It's as they say, "To provide an integrated constellation of space and cyberspace capabilities at the speed of need." In other words, they're the satellite guys.
You might better know them as the sole voice in the US government that stood up to Lightsquared and the FCC's idiot plan that will destroy GPS reception in the US so some politician's buddies can make a quick buck, by massively overloading power output on adjacent frequencies to GPS that bleed into the GPS signal like a compass inside a MRI machine. Perhaps they should have bombed the hell out of someone over that, but so far they've just used words.
Well, we could send teams from USAF Space Command armed with P90s to distant planets with alien technology, and put together a "coalition of the willing" with allies who would defy the malevolent aliens' rule...
Nah, some greedy idiot would probably pull the funding from that and we'd all die. Nevermind.
This. Mod parent up.
In this day and age of cuts to the F-22 and F-35 programs, the likelihood of the USAF spending money on "deep space radar telemetry" to check for aliens is practically nil, so I'm not sure why more people weren't skeptical of the misleading summary. Plus, as you know, the Cheyenne Mountain complex got cancelled a couple years back in budget cuts.
One thing that also shouldn't be overlooked is that this bails out SETI's ATA which otherwise would have been shut down due to lack of funding. I think SETI has some fans among the USAF Space Command who don't want to see it die. Maybe the array is useful and cost-effective for scanning for objects in geosynchronous orbit and maybe it isn't, but I think there's more to the fact that the entire thing would've been shut down without Space Command's intervention than mere coincidence.
Then try reading some of the papers he cites instead of concluding "HERP DERP ARROGANT SCIENTISTS". Because that's a little... arrogant.
Ironic, isn't it? It wasn't too long ago that it was the left that was the greatest political threat to Los Alamos and LLNL.
But today, as the article points out, it is the right, mostly starting with the Bush Administration. I'm no fan of people scapegoating George W. Bush for all of the ills of the nation, but here is a case where his administration had a profoundly negative effect upon national security. The same kind of paranoid mismanagement on a gross scale that gives you TSA cavity searches every time you get on a plane is gutting the intellectual and scientific capabilities of these institutions.
It is a further irony that we criticize fundamentalist Muslim nations for impeding the progress of science and technology, but we are allowing this to happen in our own backyard. We owe much of our technology today-- the internet, integrated circuits, a national highway system, GPS, etc to nuclear defense research and spending.
We are told we cannot compete with developing nations for manufacturing, and must do so through science and innovation. But when scientific research and scientists are undermined, then what future do we have?
The failed policies of the Bush administration and Bechtel's seizure of power must be reversed. Nuclear science should be returned to the capable hands of nuclear scientists, not a for-profit corporation that has proven hostile to science and scientists all in the name of short-term profit. Bechtel has acted against the national security interests of the US and is not fit to hold a government contract. The truth is that government-funded science does produce tremendously useful results, and nowhere has that been more apparent than in nuclear defense research. We cannot afford to lose that.
... grasshoppah. If you aren't enjoying coding at your job, or doing any on your own, you're not going to be a good candidate for another employer I'm sorry to say. You and you alone need to have an interest in pushing yourself, learning new things and pursuing what interests you. If that's "nothing, don't care" that's fine but it also means you're never going to enjoy what you do or be especially compelling as a hire.
Even within the confines of developing boring reporting, invoicing etc type business IT solutions you have a lot of leeway in how you meet the specs. If you push hard to optimize things you'll make people pleasantly surprised when things that took minutes now take seconds or less. Being innovative in how you present the data and analyze it with mathematics and statistics can present it in entirely new ways that allow people to see things that they never had before.
The work itself should be the reason you are passionate about it. And a lot of that is in how you personally choose to approach it and your attitude towards it.
Well let's see, there was DARPA that a few years ago made the most efficient solar cell to date, and years of defense research that developed breakthrough after breakthrough for solar power for satellites to provide America with satellite reconnaissance and navigation. Things you use today.
To campaign against these programs that given you technology you use every day and produced real results and scientific achievements, and have allowed America to maintain its technical edge for many years... you wouldn't have anything you'd like to tell us, would you... red?
The same thing happened to Japan's economy years before ours and everyone else's. Do you think Greece would be doing just great if the housing bubble had never burst in the US?
And no, the only thing the US still has left is a DEFENSE industry. IP is easily/cheaply made by anyone anywhere and it is a foolish notion to think Americans are somehow more innovative or creative than anyone else. After all, our "Sputnik moment" was Dr. Wernher von Braun, so I guess Obama was asking us to steal a bunch of scientists from "zee Germans" again?
At this point you're probably thinking, "defense industry? What's the F-22 got to do with anything?" Here's a little example for you: Siri. Siri was a spin-off corporation from SRI acquired by Apple, and SRI was a contractor on DARPA's PAL (personal assistant that learns) project, part of the largest AI project in history. Like so many times before, a corporation took publicly funded defense research as their "innovative" "IP". Oh yeah, they really need protections for "borrowing" the work of DARPA scientists.
Apparently, it's not actually IP until a corporation gets done copying it from DARPA. Then, holy shit! Must be protected at all costs! Oh and here China, build some DARPA technology for us while we wonder where all our jobs went and why we can't seem to stay ahead very long these days. Wait, I know, let's blame China!
Germans came to WWII with experienced soldiers, were machine-gun heavy at a unit level, had panzers, and blitzkrieg. There's pretty much no amount of money you could spend at that time on short-term purchases to stop that juggernaut that was the Wehrmacht, any more than the Wehrmacht could stop the Red Army.
I've got no love for the Red Chinese government, but every government on the planet censors the internet to some degree. Child porn? BRB, FBI. Copyright infringement? I've seen numerous Google notices my search results have been restricted due to that.
In a lot of European countries a copy of Wolfenstein 3-D would get you jail time! (they have to be intolerant, or some people might become intolerant, which cannot be tolerated)
Sure, I can read about Fabul Gong or whatever that dissident group is China seems to get all emo over all the time, but I couldn't care less about that anyway.
I don't see why China gets so butthurt about Tibet either, fact is the Tibetan people were worse off in the harsh caste system before China came along. Their invasion of Tibet was unnecessarily brutal and harsh, but today your average Tibetan is quantifiably better off for it. These are minor, stupid things that China is censoring, that are not so important.
Really, China's reply is actually more something along the lines of "lol wut? Thanks for the money!"
And you know what? China's right. As long as we trip over ourselves to sell out our jobs and technologies to them so an elite few can make a little short-term profit, they can basically do whatever the hell they want. But that's not China's fault-- China has more than earned every dollar we've paid them. We were betrayed from within, and that is where the problem lies.
Wait, what? While I thought doing away with nuclear in the hopes that solar and wind will be economical in the short term and not throw Germany's economy somewhere south of Greece was a bit hopeful, replacing it with coal? Really? Coal?
This isn't even environmentalism. This is just poor, emotional decision making.
Yes, technically coal is "renewable" via long term geological processes but you can breed crazy amounts of fissile material and recycle spent nuclear fuel so that's really not much of an argument.
Japan's new PM also intends to close down all of Japan's fission plants (though I didn't see a timetable) and I'm sort of worried that will just end up making more coal plants as well.
It's not entirely androgen dependent either. It can happen merely with elevated levels of corticosteroids, even in women or with androgen blockade, through activation TLR2 (toll-like receptor 2).
Activation of TLR2 makes you hypersensitive to lipopolysaccharide, which is part of the bacterial cell wall. So your immune system develops hypersensitivity to normal conditions.
I was on prednisone for over a year for autoimmune problems and you can develop some very nasty acne.
The bitch of it is, because prednisone is also an excellent anti-inflammatory, tapering off it makes the acne increase dramatically... because you have both the increased TLR2 activation and increased inflammation.
Russia has pretty extensive experience with rail transportation, including some of the world's deepest subways. I'd go so far as to say Moscow's subway system is the most stunning in the world-- much moreso than the DC Metro or anything in Germany.
FWIW, Russia's subway construction has certainly continued through the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present day. If you want some eye candy, Google for the Cosmonaut Avenue station.
Russia's top exports currently are, iirc, petroleum and minerals, both of which this would facilitate the export of. This could be quite beneficial in lowering or at least helping to stabilize domestic oil prices by giving us high-volume, low-cost access to a very large supply. And distribution from Alaska to the lower 48 is already a solved issue. Russia maintains rail trade with China and again, track gauge switching is something that's already been done for a long time.
And yes, you really can see Russia from Alaska. It's not altogether a bad thing.
Sure, laugh about it now. But when cyber attacks turn into invading Alaska, don't blame me if you didn't prepare by making a giant superpatriot robot and T-51B power armor.
Actually I can assure you that here in the good ol' USA not getting paid on time is pretty common. Even though it's technically illegal and the employer owes you penalty wages. (what are you going to do, sue them? when they have no cash to pay you in the first place?)
Not saying it's as bad as Russia, but I've been hit by it personally more than once.
This is because Russia has a superior and far more efficient form of government than we do.
Head of space appropriations committee... Vladimir Putin
Head of Federal Space Agency... Vladimir Putin
Head of Department of Revenue... Vladimir Putin
Space Agency Oversight Committee... Vladimir Putin
Director of Cosmodrone Development... Vladimir Putin
Soyuz Launch Officer... Vladimir Putin
Cosmonauts No. 1 - 6... Vladimir Putin
Women's Tennis Quality Oversight... Vladimir Putin
And that, comrade, is why Russia won the space race.