Rather than simply playing on my username and imply that I am wrong, ignorant, or otherwise lacking in making my argument perhaps you could enlighten me? I love a good debate but I try to avoid wrestling with pigs.
Are you saying more people would have lived if the Allies had inferior weapons in fighting the Nazis? Sure, let's give the "good guys" weapons that fail to work properly and are just as likely to kill the operator as the target. That will certainly save more lives. Because the "bad guys" will simply die from laughter at the sight of their adversaries committing suicide en masse.
U-233 bombs are theoretical and the handful of times it has been tried were failures. The "failures" didn't mean they didn't explode since the conventional explosives used to initiate the nuclear reaction is sufficient to cause considerable damage and turn the core into a dirty bomb. Those that did achieve fission with U-233 did so only with a mix with another fuel, U-235 or Pu-239, and with a yield lower than expected. The value of U-233 to "boost" the yield of a weapon is debatable because of the results of these tests. Other materials and methods, like common natural uranium as a second or third stage, are much more feasible. This still leaves the value of U-233 as a primary fission source as theoretical.
Another problem with using U-233 as a weapon core is dealing with U-232 contamination. U-232 has a bad habit of decaying with it's (relatively) short half life and sometimes doing so with spontaneous fission. The radiation from the weapon core might be dealt with by using heavy shielding or by not caring if the laborers get potentially lethal doses of radiation. Another way to deal with it is to allow the U-232 to decay away but that requires lengthy planning. By "lengthy" I mean waiting out the ~70 year half life long enough that the unwanted isotopes decay away. If one is dealing with U-232 by simply not caring about the radiation load then there is still the problem of the spontaneous fission. I'm not sure what those effects would be but I assume it means a short shelf life for the weapon, a potential "fizzile" (extremely low yield), and possibly premature detonation. None of those effects can be good.
Use of U-233 as a weapon core is so far from practical that it may as well be considered impossible. Obtaining useful quantities of sufficiently pure U-235 and/or Pu-239 is so much easier that weaponizing U-233 will likely never be attempted again. If it is attempted then it will be by some people that are very desperate or people with enough experience in making nuclear weapons that the U-233 bomb would be more of a theoretical exercise than anything considered as viable weapon research.
People spreading the FUD of U-233 as possible weapon grade material do so out of ignorance or by knowing that such weapons are effectively impossible but don't like nuclear power for one reason or another. The reasons to oppose nuclear power in all it's forms may again be based on ignorance but I'm starting to believe that there are political reasons to oppose it even though it is worthless to produce weapons.
Damn, right! And prisons infringe on my right to assemble! [/snark]
Oh please. I'm likely one of the biggest proponents of the Second Amendment you'll ever hear from and yet I recognize the need for police to disarm those intent on harming others. It's kind of the point of the Second Amendment, isn't it? To be able to stop the other guy before they stop you? Doing so without killing them is always preferred but not always possible.
Or, more succinctly, the US Constitution is not a suicide pact.
Also, I find the logic over guns from the Democrats rather hypocritical. They will claim that the police are hunting and killing people, especially young Black men. They will also claim that if you feel threatened then you should not carry a gun, only rely on the police to carry guns to protect you. Tell me, if all of these police gone mustang are hunting down unarmed citizens then would it not be logical to allow these victims of police harassment to arm themselves against these police officers? If these police officers are murderers then do they still have the legal protections of acting under the color of law? I'd think not because if so then it's not just the individual police officer killing innocent citizens it is our government. The government should want these mustang officers gone as much as the citizenry, and therefore should not be concerned if they are shot, even if that means killing them rather than just injuring them.
So Democrats, which is it, are police bad or are they good? If they are bad then I'd think we should be rid of the police, or at least disarm them like any other citizen. If they are good then we should not fear being shot by them and they can keep their guns.
For a long time the police were the good guys and at least the reliance on them to protect us from the bad guys had some logic to it. A flawed logic since an armed public could then assist the police in controlling crime but that can be explained away with things like access to cellphones with cameras so that people could at least be good witnesses. When the police became the bad guys then we are at a place where we cannot allow the public to be armed, or the police to be armed, but yet the criminals are armed. How is an unarmed person, common citizen or police, supposed to stop a criminal armed with a lethal weapon?
Criminals should be disarmed. To do so takes people that are also armed. If people can disarm a criminal with a wheeled drone then that works for me. It also means that the "arms" as protected by the Second Amendment includes many things, such as wheeled drones.
I watched the video you linked to and I see that the F-5 and its derivatives were fine aircraft. Its development proves that in some cases a successful fighter aircraft can be designed without a cost plus contract.
What sets the F-5 apart from the many other successful fighter aircraft was its size and cost. This was able to be built and tested by Northrup on spec because they had a low cost aircraft with a high probability of sales. A lot of the development costs were already sunk from previous aircraft and missile designs and so they were able to do this at a cost they could afford to gamble.
Being such a small aircraft it cannot carry much of a weapon load. It proved very successful as a trainer and reconnaissance airframe for wealthier nations and a passable fighter for less developed nations. It could not hold up to more advanced aircraft even at the time unless, as pointed out at the end of the film, one would allow for heavy losses and computed success at a dollar cost. That would make the pilots cannon fodder for the enemy. A useful tactic if one wanted to win the war by bankrupting the enemy from losing fewer but more expensive airframes to their own cheap and plentiful ones.
It was a cost effective, high performance and durable jet fighter, a product of the time when US engineering still meant quality and defense companies actually cared about the quality and value of their products, not just their profits.
That sounds like a beauty in the eye of the beholder. The F-5 is "high performance" relative to many aircraft of the time but still not an effective fighter to an adversary with more advanced aircraft. It is agile, no doubt, but it cannot carry the quantity of weapons of other larger fighters of the time.
I'm not sure what to say about the quality vs. profits comment. I'd hope that the two go together. If one wants to be profitable then the product must have quality and value. I'd think that a low quality product is only profitable in the case of a monopoly or some other coercion preventing competition.
The F-5 did have competition, including it's earlier variants. As such it evolved into a number of different variants, serving a number of different roles, and not all were successful. The F-20, which solved many complaints from the earlier F-5 variants, did not sell. Competition from the (cheaper and less capable) F-5E and (more expensive and more capable) F-16 likely killed it.
Have you done the math on how much dirt we'd have to mine to get enough mineral to make solar and batteries provide all out energy needs? Then how much land we'd have to cover to collect that energy?
I've seen the math and as I recall the level of resources needed is ten time that of coal, nuclear, or natural gas. If we rule out coal and gas because of greenhouse emissions then we are left with nuclear. I'm not saying we should be pro-nuclear, just pro-math.
I'm fine with the continued burning of coal and gas but only so long as stopping the use of those resources for energy does not result in a larger environmental disaster. Solar and batteries would be an environmental disaster. The cost of that energy would be an economic disaster to the point people would starve. I thought the goal was to save humans, no? Then again some of these enviro-nuts believe the world would be better off if humans chose extinction. Well, solar power is not likely to end the human race but it'd be suicidal for a large portion of it.
Nationalize? Or do you mean socialize? You mean like the communists have done? Tell me, how well has that worked out for them?
I have a solution too, I say the government can only buy from the open market. I don't mean that Lockheed has to provide the F-35 to other governments, I mean that Lockheed would have to sell the F-35 to any person or corporation able to pay for it.
I won't say my idea is likely. I won't say my idea is even a good idea. I'm just saying it's a better idea than yours.
Another thing, perhaps more of a side note. I noticed that this is called "nationalizing" if "we" do it, but it's called "socializing" if "they" do it. Might be because using anything with "nation" in the name provokes patriotism while the use of "social" is equated with Marxism. It wasn't always this way, otherwise the US Social Security Act would have a different name.
Cyber warfare will also be much more devastating than whatever damage this overpriced toy can produce.
I don't follow, perhaps you have a different definition of cyber warfare than what I am familiar with. The kind of cyber warfare I know of attacks certain kinds of infrastructure, communications, and electrical supplies. Which in most every case would be annoying, not deadly.
We've all likely read about or seen in movies about how someone was able to "hack" into some control system and caused physical damage. Any reasonably designed system will not allow a remote user to do anything that can cause permanent damage. It's possible that someone might be able to do something like make a uranium centrifuge spin too fast and not give any indication to the user that it has done so. This requires a lot of prior knowledge of the system, some very talented people, a lot of time, and an enemy that lacks proper security protocols. If it works at all then it will work only once. After that the hole in the system will be plugged.
On the other hand if someone were to instead bomb the uranium refining facility you'd not only destroy the centrifuges, just like the cyber attack would have, but the building would be destroyed, the uranium lost, the people that run the facility would be dead or injured, and they'd be set back much further. Such a bomb run would also mean removal of any plausible deniability of being involved. There would be undeniable evidence of an attack. Even stealthy planes like the F-35 cannot hide completely on where they came from, it's not going to take long to figure out where such attacks came from.
Cyber attacks are useful since they can provide a nuisance and cost (in time, money, people) for an enemy. The anonymity that a cyber attack gives is certainly good for many reasons. They can only do so much damage and only for so long. I have a WWII era rifle and a pair of combat boots that can do more damage than many cyber attacks. F-35 fighters can do even more damage.
Any sophisticated military will combine cyber warfare with bombs & bullets. This also requires that the enemy even has a "cyber" to "warfare". History shows one does not need electronics to effectively fight a modern war.
I hear this often as a complaint against cost plus contracts but I believe that people do not understand why such contracts are necessary.
The US government, or any government really, needs stuff that simply cannot be obtained on the open market. This is especially true if you want to keep things secret, companies that go bankrupt tend to not keep things secret for many reasons. If the government makes a contract at a set price then no company in their right mind would sign off, it would simply be too much risk.
A lot of companies will sign a contract for a product knowing it will be a loss because they are gambling that the product can be sold at a profit to subsequent customers. This is often how new passenger aircraft will get built. The first person to buy such an aircraft will get a deep discount knowing that they are experimenting. They hope the costs of working out the bugs will be offset by their discount. Later customers for the aircraft will pay a higher price, and do so willingly, because they are getting an aircraft that is proven to be of value.
This also works for passenger aircraft because there is a larger number of airframes to spread development cost over. There were about 1500 F-15 fighters built but over 9000 Boeing 737 passenger and freight airframes built.
When building a military aircraft you have only one customer, and no means to make a profit if that customer backs out. If the government wants someone to build anything for them, and only for them, then they will have to make a promise of a profit for that company.
I know someone is just waiting to point out that the F-35 has a dozen "customers" but that is a moot point here. Of the approximately 2000 F-35 airframes ordered the US government will buy 1800 of them, this is effectively no different than if the US was the only customer.
I'm sure Lockheed just loves these "setbacks" because it makes them a profit. Forget the fact that setbacks make it that much more difficult to get future contracts. Forget the fact that setbacks distract from other potentially money making efforts. Forget the fact that even a big "evil" corporation that builds "killing machines" has people that work for them and people don't like to see other people die because the product they produced failed to protect their lives.
I really need to stop replying to anonymous cowards but I could not let this go by for some reason.
GM made the announcement on Wednesday, revealing that it planned to generate or source all its electrical power needs for its 350 operations in 59 countries with 100% renewable energy such as wind, solar, and landfill gas, by 2050.
Why do this? Seems like a noble goal but with the goal so far out it would seem that no one working for the company toady will still be working for the company when this goal is due. What they are promising is that their successors will meet this goal. This is a goal far enough out it could conceivably be their grandchildren being responsible for this. This is just marketing, pure and simple, they cannot conceivably be held responsible if they fail or meet this goal.
GM is likely getting enviro-nuts on their case from all angles right now, since their products are considered a major consumer of those "evil" fossil fuels. They had to do something about it, right? But they needed to have shareholders buy in, and right now renewable energy is expensive. So, they put the goal out in the future far enough to not affect the stock price now.
Then we get to how this could even be achievable. Wind and solar are too unreliable to run a business. Landfill gas is such a rare commodity that it is even laughable to consider this as an energy source to run a factory. I suppose it is possible to for GM to own enough wind and solar power that, with some creative accounting, they can claim all the energy they consume was equivalent to the solar and wind energy they produced. This requires a market for their excess energy when it is available and someone to produce it for them when it is not. Where is this energy going to come from?
This energy will come from coal, of course. That is unless we have some huge leap in technology in how wind and solar energy is collected and converted. Even with a goal as far out as 2050 I don't see this as possible. We've made great gains in wind and solar energy but we passed the point of diminishing returns a long time ago.
The only possibility that I see for GM to have "green" energy, at a price that won't kill their stock value, and not require clever accounting, is with nuclear power. But nuclear power doesn't make many of these enviro-nuts happy. These enviro-nuts that think we can live in a world powered by wind and solar are insane or ignorant, possibly both. The resources in land, steel, aluminum, concrete, and so on for wind and solar is ten times that for coal, gas, or nuclear. There's your environmental disaster, many many square kilometers of land paved over for windmills and solar panels.
In short this press release is a lie. They are lying in that this goal is even achievable or they are lying by omission by not mentioning that nuclear power is part of the plan. It appears no one has bothered to challenge them on how they plan to meet their goal. This is only possible because the enviro-nuts are too insane to be bothered with the math, or too ignorant to understand the math. I'm not necessarily pro-nuclear but I am pro-math. I've seen the math and the only way this adds up is with nuclear power or some technology that does not exist yet. Anyone that thinks we'll have some new technology that can beat nuclear by 2050 is insane, ignorant, or both.
Animals, like humans, require shelter. If a rat has lost their shelter then they are at greater risk of predators, exposure to elements, etc. They'd also likely lose their breeding partners.
The article you linked to talked about how ineffective trapping is since it can cause them to scatter, which is quite different than dry ice exposure. Dry ice exposure might cause some scattering but if the use of dry ice is done systematically, and consistently, then they can stay ahead of the scattering. At least that's my theory.
Also, presumably this dry ice use is in addition to traps, not to replace it. Use the dry ice to deny the use of the burrow and put out traps to catch those that scatter. No doubt some will get away but we're not necessarily trying to eradicate them, only control them. Those that get past the dry ice and traps will now be more likely to be caught by dogs, cats, etc.
What the problem seems to be with trapping causing the spread of disease is that too many of the rats get away. In other words it may be that they just didn't put out enough traps.
Liquid nitrogen is, by definition, a liquid. Liquids would be more difficult to handle than a solid. It's also colder, very much so, than dry ice which makes it a greater freezing hazard. If someone drops some dry ice then it's not going to flow all over the ground where it can damage property or injure people. A spill of dry ice can be managed with a shovel or gloved hand. Spill some liquid nitrogen and you are not getting it back and you are just going to have to deal with the mess.
Also, the suffocation sensation of elevated CO2 levels is a feature, not a bug. In the case of a N2 leak or spill the workers can pass out and die without knowing anything is wrong. With CO2 the people working with it have a natural aversion to its presence and therefore can leave the area before it can cause harm.
Let the rats suffer, I don't care. It's people I care about. CO2 is cheaper and safer to handle, so I say we use that.
Put them in jail and then what? Either by law or tradition the committee members of every executive agency is split between the two major parties. The number of members on these committees is always an odd number with a majority with the party in power at the time. So, we take these Republicans, toss them in jail, and then replace them with some other Republicans, at which time those Republicans can refuse to hand over the documents. Rinse, lather, repeat.
I don't know who is the bad guy here. It could be the Democrats for trying to make the Republicans look bad over something completely innocent. It could be the Republicans trying to hide wrongdoing from the Democrats. I can hear it now, if they have nothing to hide then why not share the documents? Perhaps the Republicans are aware that the Democrats are playing political games and they figure this is the best way to stop it. The Democrats have had a few bad weeks recently in the polls and it might be that the Democrats are looking for ways to make themselves look good. It's quite possible that even if the Republicans handed over everything that the Democrats asked for the Democrats would still claim something is missing.
Aren't we seeing this with the Clinton e-mail server thing going on? The Republicans will claim that e-mails are missing but the Democrats say everything was handed over. How can you prove there are no more documents to hand over? It's not like this is a bank account and someone can show there is no more money with a balance note. This is a request for documents that may have never been created. Even if they handed over every single document someone can claim documents are missing because they didn't find the dirt they are looking for.
We have an election in a few weeks, so even if someone was going to put these people in jail for contempt of Congress, or whatever, they will be out again after the election because keeping them there would be problematic politically. If Congress gets in the habit of putting commissioners in jail because they don't like what party they are in then we are going to have even bigger problems in the future.
Why would they continue to allow a VPN across this nationwide firewall?
The goal is to protect the Britons from "bad" websites as defined by the government. The first thing they want to try is to hide these sites from Britons by removing any DNS entry to them. When the government realizes that people are circumventing their firewall then I'd fully expect them to do what they can to block that traffic as well.
This is doomed to fail since, as you predict, people will find a way around it. If they are successful in gaining control of DNS servers within the UK then expect them to follow with greater controls on the internet once circumventing the firewall becomes nearly routine. This will end in one of two ways, either they succeed in killing the internet and something else replaces it, or people get exceedingly upset with the inability to communicate freely on the internet and these idiots that think they can control the internet are removed from government.
The potato was just one example. Replace with cabbage, radish, beet, peas, apple, rhubarb, wheat, corn, or whatever. The concept applies to all edible plant life. Cooking of vegetables will release more energy, and kill off disease, regardless of the vegetable under discussion. It also applies equally for ancient humans and modern humans, cooking vegetables is generally a good idea.
Of course cooked food didn't happen naturally. People figured it out and cooked it themselves. People had fire to stay warm, no? It would not be inconceivable that food happened to fall in the fire at some point. A brave and/or hungry person picked the meat out of the fire and it tasted good. At this point cooked food could spread rapidly. What follows would be the slow evolution to a species that could cook food. Those that cook food would be more likely to survive future stresses.
It seems that in time the truth does come out. That buying cherry picked scientific data will lead to a result that carries a patina of science when it is not.
Living in an area full of corn fields, windmills, and ethanol plants I hear a lot of "science" about global warming. Why would these industries not try to skew scientific results to make sure their government subsidies come in?
Am I saying that global warming is a hoax? No. Am I saying that "big wind" and "big corn" have been buying global warming data? No. What I am saying is that since we've been seeing government funded research into global warming, and a lot of political contributions and lobbying from industries like wind, corn, ethanol, electric cars, natural gas fracking, and so forth I am thinking that it is possible that global warming is in fact a hoax.
What also leads me to believe that it is possible that global warming is a hoax is the little investment in nuclear power. We have new reactors that cannot blow their top like Fukushima, Three Mile Island, or Chernobyl because they don't have cooling water that can overheat and boil explosively. These new reactors have liquid fuel that cannot melt down because it is already molten. If it gets too hot then it expands to reduce the fission rate. If it gets hotter still then it can be drained in to a cooling tank, where fission stops and passive air cooling kicks in.
If the goal was to reduce carbon output then the best way to do so is with nuclear power. Since nuclear power is stagnant here then I must assume that global warming is not a problem. If nuclear power was a problem then we'd have shut them all down by now. So nuclear power is merely allowed to exist because it is not a problem. It's not a solution because the problem isn't global warming, the problem is that people need to get paid government money, or something. It's hard to explain but it is there. A lot of people spending money to prove a "problem" exists so that more money can be spent to keep these wealthy people employed in doing something that looks like it might solve the "problem" that they didn't create in reality but in the "science". It is either a lie or an exaggeration.
The government isn't there to solve a problem, but to manage it. If the problem went away then a lot of government people would be out of a job. I expect the global warming lie to be exposed like the sugar lie. It will take decades until the data is hard to ignore. After that I expect a new nuclear renaissance. It's been over 40 years since we've stopped expanding the US nuclear power fleet. For it to replace fossil fuels we must built nuclear power at the same rate as those fossil fuels. That means something like a one new gigawatt nuclear power plant built somewhere in the world every week. Since the USA consume about 1/4th of that then a new nuclear power plant somewhere in the USA every month. Anything less and we continue to live the lie of global warming hoax or that global warming is real and we are lying to ourselves that we are doing something about it.
I won't say that sucrose is benign but IMHO it tastes better. I'll buy the cane sugar products over the HFCS when I can because, health benefits or not, I like it. If there is some truth to the benefits of sucrose then I gain that way too.
We are the result of the portion of the species that survived because of cooked meat. The ones that didn't cook their meat, or ate only a vegetarian diet, didn't survive. Saying that cooked meat did not occur naturally is nonsense, and I hope you know better and are just trying to be funny.
Evolution occurs very slowly but natural selection is an action that can happen in quite a short time. We as a species have had long periods of "convolution", where the species didn't necessarily improve toward any one path of evolution but merely developed traits through random mutation that made some portions of the population more suited to survive some future stressor. When that stressor arrived the people that knew how to cook meat were able to survive.
As you point out the cooking of meat was quite likely followed by the domestication of animals, then farming, and then what we would consider the modern era.
The question might be what stressors would favor those that could cook meat and digest it. I imagine several such stressors. Disease would be more easily controlled by those that cooked meat. The heat would kill off many pathogens and allow for greater ease of digestion. A cold period (An ice age or even a short winter freeze) would mean those that knew how to make fire would stay warm, and cooked food would give those that ate it more energy than merely warm fresh killed meat. I suspect frozen meat is inedible to anyone except those capable of heating it up, if not to cook but at least thaw.
It's not just meat that is best eaten cooked. I believe a potato is much more edible once baked, boiled, or fried. E. coli is bad for people but cooking your fruits and vegetables will make it safe from them. I recall a shortage of fresh tomatoes not too long ago because of an E. coli scare but there was no shortage of ketchup, canned tomatoes, tomato sauces, etc. because the cooking killed the bacteria.
This cooking of food had been going on for about a million years now. Long enough that there are many many people that get sick from undercooked food. It would be difficult to live with out fire and cooked food any more.
After the cooking came the convolution. After the stressors the cooked meat eaters survived. More convolution, another stressor, more survival of the fittest. In some parts of the world fitness meant milk drinkers. I like milk, I'm drinking some as I type this. This might be stretching the definition of "cooking" a bit here but pasteurizing or canning milk would seem like a good way to get protein, calories, and hydration for a lot of people.
This ability to survive on the foods we've been eating for thousands of years means we've developed features in our digestion beyond just our teeth and the size of our guts. We have a different immune system. We can tolerate lactose as adults. We also have a caloric and nutrient intake requirements that are difficult to obtain from uncooked food.
I won't say it is impossible for people to have a healthy diet that lacks cooked food. I will say that it will be expensive in time, money, and perhaps in other ways.
In some cases it's worth it even if you are not a regular Amazon customer. I found out that Amazon offers free Prime membership to college students. That came in handy for finding books for most classes and a couple movies for a literature class.
Amazon: Search for item on website on a Sunday. Place order. Item appears on doorstep Monday or Tuesday while I'm at work.
Best Buy: Search for item on website on a Sunday. Place order. Decide if I want it that day, which means a special trip driving to the store for in store pick-up. Decide if I want it Monday, which means a short detour on my way home from work for in-store pickup. Decide if I can wait until Tuesday and not have to drive to Best Buy and have it delivered to my door while I'm out.
I believe you made the Best Buy shopping experience intentionally more difficult by starting off with having to go to the store. Just about everything they sell is on their web site. What is better is that they list things on the web site that they carry but might not be in the store nearest you.
I'm not defending Best Buy exactly, just brick and mortar stores generally. I really don't like Best Buy but around here they have a near monopoly. It's either Best Buy, a handful of mom-n-pop shops, or an hour long drive to the next county for the next big box store. When I shop I'll check Best Buy, Amazon, and a few other online stores I trust. If it's something I want right away I know I can check the websites of the brick and mortar stores around here and see if something is in stock. For example, there are two or three Target stores near me and if I want something I think they might sell I can go to their web site and see if they offer the product, at what price, and if it is in stock near me for pickup. I did just that not too long ago, ended up it wasn't in stock near me so I had it sent by post. I recall that since my order met some minimum price I paid nothing for shipping. If it was in stock then I would have gone there, got what I wanted, and while I was there I would have picked up some groceries too.
One thing I hate to do is buy clothes online. I have to see it and try it on before I buy. So when I needed a new pair of shoes I went to a couple stores to try them on. I found a pair I liked but not in the right color. No problem, they just asked for my address at checkout and mailed them to me for no additional charge. If for some reason the shoes or clothes didn't fit when I was able to try them on at home I have the option to take it directly to the store, get my refund or exchange handled immediately, and be done with it. That's what a brick and mortar store with good customer service can do that Amazon cannot right now.
I have not had to return items to Amazon yet but my brother loves shopping with Amazon. If they had a brick and mortar store where I could see their items in real life, not have to worry about mailing things back for exchange, and other conveniences of a brick and mortar store then I'd likely buy more stuff from them.
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Rather than simply playing on my username and imply that I am wrong, ignorant, or otherwise lacking in making my argument perhaps you could enlighten me? I love a good debate but I try to avoid wrestling with pigs.
I'll put Godwin's law into effect...
Are you saying more people would have lived if the Allies had inferior weapons in fighting the Nazis? Sure, let's give the "good guys" weapons that fail to work properly and are just as likely to kill the operator as the target. That will certainly save more lives. Because the "bad guys" will simply die from laughter at the sight of their adversaries committing suicide en masse.
Idiot.
U-233 bombs are theoretical and the handful of times it has been tried were failures. The "failures" didn't mean they didn't explode since the conventional explosives used to initiate the nuclear reaction is sufficient to cause considerable damage and turn the core into a dirty bomb. Those that did achieve fission with U-233 did so only with a mix with another fuel, U-235 or Pu-239, and with a yield lower than expected. The value of U-233 to "boost" the yield of a weapon is debatable because of the results of these tests. Other materials and methods, like common natural uranium as a second or third stage, are much more feasible. This still leaves the value of U-233 as a primary fission source as theoretical.
Another problem with using U-233 as a weapon core is dealing with U-232 contamination. U-232 has a bad habit of decaying with it's (relatively) short half life and sometimes doing so with spontaneous fission. The radiation from the weapon core might be dealt with by using heavy shielding or by not caring if the laborers get potentially lethal doses of radiation. Another way to deal with it is to allow the U-232 to decay away but that requires lengthy planning. By "lengthy" I mean waiting out the ~70 year half life long enough that the unwanted isotopes decay away. If one is dealing with U-232 by simply not caring about the radiation load then there is still the problem of the spontaneous fission. I'm not sure what those effects would be but I assume it means a short shelf life for the weapon, a potential "fizzile" (extremely low yield), and possibly premature detonation. None of those effects can be good.
Use of U-233 as a weapon core is so far from practical that it may as well be considered impossible. Obtaining useful quantities of sufficiently pure U-235 and/or Pu-239 is so much easier that weaponizing U-233 will likely never be attempted again. If it is attempted then it will be by some people that are very desperate or people with enough experience in making nuclear weapons that the U-233 bomb would be more of a theoretical exercise than anything considered as viable weapon research.
People spreading the FUD of U-233 as possible weapon grade material do so out of ignorance or by knowing that such weapons are effectively impossible but don't like nuclear power for one reason or another. The reasons to oppose nuclear power in all it's forms may again be based on ignorance but I'm starting to believe that there are political reasons to oppose it even though it is worthless to produce weapons.
Damn, right! And prisons infringe on my right to assemble! [/snark]
Oh please. I'm likely one of the biggest proponents of the Second Amendment you'll ever hear from and yet I recognize the need for police to disarm those intent on harming others. It's kind of the point of the Second Amendment, isn't it? To be able to stop the other guy before they stop you? Doing so without killing them is always preferred but not always possible.
Or, more succinctly, the US Constitution is not a suicide pact.
Also, I find the logic over guns from the Democrats rather hypocritical. They will claim that the police are hunting and killing people, especially young Black men. They will also claim that if you feel threatened then you should not carry a gun, only rely on the police to carry guns to protect you. Tell me, if all of these police gone mustang are hunting down unarmed citizens then would it not be logical to allow these victims of police harassment to arm themselves against these police officers? If these police officers are murderers then do they still have the legal protections of acting under the color of law? I'd think not because if so then it's not just the individual police officer killing innocent citizens it is our government. The government should want these mustang officers gone as much as the citizenry, and therefore should not be concerned if they are shot, even if that means killing them rather than just injuring them.
So Democrats, which is it, are police bad or are they good? If they are bad then I'd think we should be rid of the police, or at least disarm them like any other citizen. If they are good then we should not fear being shot by them and they can keep their guns.
For a long time the police were the good guys and at least the reliance on them to protect us from the bad guys had some logic to it. A flawed logic since an armed public could then assist the police in controlling crime but that can be explained away with things like access to cellphones with cameras so that people could at least be good witnesses. When the police became the bad guys then we are at a place where we cannot allow the public to be armed, or the police to be armed, but yet the criminals are armed. How is an unarmed person, common citizen or police, supposed to stop a criminal armed with a lethal weapon?
Criminals should be disarmed. To do so takes people that are also armed. If people can disarm a criminal with a wheeled drone then that works for me. It also means that the "arms" as protected by the Second Amendment includes many things, such as wheeled drones.
And, he forgot to say, "Please."
I watched the video you linked to and I see that the F-5 and its derivatives were fine aircraft. Its development proves that in some cases a successful fighter aircraft can be designed without a cost plus contract.
What sets the F-5 apart from the many other successful fighter aircraft was its size and cost. This was able to be built and tested by Northrup on spec because they had a low cost aircraft with a high probability of sales. A lot of the development costs were already sunk from previous aircraft and missile designs and so they were able to do this at a cost they could afford to gamble.
Being such a small aircraft it cannot carry much of a weapon load. It proved very successful as a trainer and reconnaissance airframe for wealthier nations and a passable fighter for less developed nations. It could not hold up to more advanced aircraft even at the time unless, as pointed out at the end of the film, one would allow for heavy losses and computed success at a dollar cost. That would make the pilots cannon fodder for the enemy. A useful tactic if one wanted to win the war by bankrupting the enemy from losing fewer but more expensive airframes to their own cheap and plentiful ones.
It was a cost effective, high performance and durable jet fighter, a product of the time when US engineering still meant quality and defense companies actually cared about the quality and value of their products, not just their profits.
That sounds like a beauty in the eye of the beholder. The F-5 is "high performance" relative to many aircraft of the time but still not an effective fighter to an adversary with more advanced aircraft. It is agile, no doubt, but it cannot carry the quantity of weapons of other larger fighters of the time.
I'm not sure what to say about the quality vs. profits comment. I'd hope that the two go together. If one wants to be profitable then the product must have quality and value. I'd think that a low quality product is only profitable in the case of a monopoly or some other coercion preventing competition.
The F-5 did have competition, including it's earlier variants. As such it evolved into a number of different variants, serving a number of different roles, and not all were successful. The F-20, which solved many complaints from the earlier F-5 variants, did not sell. Competition from the (cheaper and less capable) F-5E and (more expensive and more capable) F-16 likely killed it.
Florida Man...
Worst. Superhero. Ever.
Have you done the math on how much dirt we'd have to mine to get enough mineral to make solar and batteries provide all out energy needs? Then how much land we'd have to cover to collect that energy?
I've seen the math and as I recall the level of resources needed is ten time that of coal, nuclear, or natural gas. If we rule out coal and gas because of greenhouse emissions then we are left with nuclear. I'm not saying we should be pro-nuclear, just pro-math.
I'm fine with the continued burning of coal and gas but only so long as stopping the use of those resources for energy does not result in a larger environmental disaster. Solar and batteries would be an environmental disaster. The cost of that energy would be an economic disaster to the point people would starve. I thought the goal was to save humans, no? Then again some of these enviro-nuts believe the world would be better off if humans chose extinction. Well, solar power is not likely to end the human race but it'd be suicidal for a large portion of it.
Whoosh!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Nationalize? Or do you mean socialize? You mean like the communists have done? Tell me, how well has that worked out for them?
I have a solution too, I say the government can only buy from the open market. I don't mean that Lockheed has to provide the F-35 to other governments, I mean that Lockheed would have to sell the F-35 to any person or corporation able to pay for it.
I won't say my idea is likely. I won't say my idea is even a good idea. I'm just saying it's a better idea than yours.
Another thing, perhaps more of a side note. I noticed that this is called "nationalizing" if "we" do it, but it's called "socializing" if "they" do it. Might be because using anything with "nation" in the name provokes patriotism while the use of "social" is equated with Marxism. It wasn't always this way, otherwise the US Social Security Act would have a different name.
Cyber warfare will also be much more devastating than whatever damage this overpriced toy can produce.
I don't follow, perhaps you have a different definition of cyber warfare than what I am familiar with. The kind of cyber warfare I know of attacks certain kinds of infrastructure, communications, and electrical supplies. Which in most every case would be annoying, not deadly.
We've all likely read about or seen in movies about how someone was able to "hack" into some control system and caused physical damage. Any reasonably designed system will not allow a remote user to do anything that can cause permanent damage. It's possible that someone might be able to do something like make a uranium centrifuge spin too fast and not give any indication to the user that it has done so. This requires a lot of prior knowledge of the system, some very talented people, a lot of time, and an enemy that lacks proper security protocols. If it works at all then it will work only once. After that the hole in the system will be plugged.
On the other hand if someone were to instead bomb the uranium refining facility you'd not only destroy the centrifuges, just like the cyber attack would have, but the building would be destroyed, the uranium lost, the people that run the facility would be dead or injured, and they'd be set back much further. Such a bomb run would also mean removal of any plausible deniability of being involved. There would be undeniable evidence of an attack. Even stealthy planes like the F-35 cannot hide completely on where they came from, it's not going to take long to figure out where such attacks came from.
Cyber attacks are useful since they can provide a nuisance and cost (in time, money, people) for an enemy. The anonymity that a cyber attack gives is certainly good for many reasons. They can only do so much damage and only for so long. I have a WWII era rifle and a pair of combat boots that can do more damage than many cyber attacks. F-35 fighters can do even more damage.
Any sophisticated military will combine cyber warfare with bombs & bullets. This also requires that the enemy even has a "cyber" to "warfare". History shows one does not need electronics to effectively fight a modern war.
I hear this often as a complaint against cost plus contracts but I believe that people do not understand why such contracts are necessary.
The US government, or any government really, needs stuff that simply cannot be obtained on the open market. This is especially true if you want to keep things secret, companies that go bankrupt tend to not keep things secret for many reasons. If the government makes a contract at a set price then no company in their right mind would sign off, it would simply be too much risk.
A lot of companies will sign a contract for a product knowing it will be a loss because they are gambling that the product can be sold at a profit to subsequent customers. This is often how new passenger aircraft will get built. The first person to buy such an aircraft will get a deep discount knowing that they are experimenting. They hope the costs of working out the bugs will be offset by their discount. Later customers for the aircraft will pay a higher price, and do so willingly, because they are getting an aircraft that is proven to be of value.
This also works for passenger aircraft because there is a larger number of airframes to spread development cost over. There were about 1500 F-15 fighters built but over 9000 Boeing 737 passenger and freight airframes built.
When building a military aircraft you have only one customer, and no means to make a profit if that customer backs out. If the government wants someone to build anything for them, and only for them, then they will have to make a promise of a profit for that company.
I know someone is just waiting to point out that the F-35 has a dozen "customers" but that is a moot point here. Of the approximately 2000 F-35 airframes ordered the US government will buy 1800 of them, this is effectively no different than if the US was the only customer.
I'm sure Lockheed just loves these "setbacks" because it makes them a profit. Forget the fact that setbacks make it that much more difficult to get future contracts. Forget the fact that setbacks distract from other potentially money making efforts. Forget the fact that even a big "evil" corporation that builds "killing machines" has people that work for them and people don't like to see other people die because the product they produced failed to protect their lives.
I really need to stop replying to anonymous cowards but I could not let this go by for some reason.
GM made the announcement on Wednesday, revealing that it planned to generate or source all its electrical power needs for its 350 operations in 59 countries with 100% renewable energy such as wind, solar, and landfill gas, by 2050.
Why do this? Seems like a noble goal but with the goal so far out it would seem that no one working for the company toady will still be working for the company when this goal is due. What they are promising is that their successors will meet this goal. This is a goal far enough out it could conceivably be their grandchildren being responsible for this. This is just marketing, pure and simple, they cannot conceivably be held responsible if they fail or meet this goal.
GM is likely getting enviro-nuts on their case from all angles right now, since their products are considered a major consumer of those "evil" fossil fuels. They had to do something about it, right? But they needed to have shareholders buy in, and right now renewable energy is expensive. So, they put the goal out in the future far enough to not affect the stock price now.
Then we get to how this could even be achievable. Wind and solar are too unreliable to run a business. Landfill gas is such a rare commodity that it is even laughable to consider this as an energy source to run a factory. I suppose it is possible to for GM to own enough wind and solar power that, with some creative accounting, they can claim all the energy they consume was equivalent to the solar and wind energy they produced. This requires a market for their excess energy when it is available and someone to produce it for them when it is not. Where is this energy going to come from?
This energy will come from coal, of course. That is unless we have some huge leap in technology in how wind and solar energy is collected and converted. Even with a goal as far out as 2050 I don't see this as possible. We've made great gains in wind and solar energy but we passed the point of diminishing returns a long time ago.
The only possibility that I see for GM to have "green" energy, at a price that won't kill their stock value, and not require clever accounting, is with nuclear power. But nuclear power doesn't make many of these enviro-nuts happy. These enviro-nuts that think we can live in a world powered by wind and solar are insane or ignorant, possibly both. The resources in land, steel, aluminum, concrete, and so on for wind and solar is ten times that for coal, gas, or nuclear. There's your environmental disaster, many many square kilometers of land paved over for windmills and solar panels.
In short this press release is a lie. They are lying in that this goal is even achievable or they are lying by omission by not mentioning that nuclear power is part of the plan. It appears no one has bothered to challenge them on how they plan to meet their goal. This is only possible because the enviro-nuts are too insane to be bothered with the math, or too ignorant to understand the math. I'm not necessarily pro-nuclear but I am pro-math. I've seen the math and the only way this adds up is with nuclear power or some technology that does not exist yet. Anyone that thinks we'll have some new technology that can beat nuclear by 2050 is insane, ignorant, or both.
Animals, like humans, require shelter. If a rat has lost their shelter then they are at greater risk of predators, exposure to elements, etc. They'd also likely lose their breeding partners.
The article you linked to talked about how ineffective trapping is since it can cause them to scatter, which is quite different than dry ice exposure. Dry ice exposure might cause some scattering but if the use of dry ice is done systematically, and consistently, then they can stay ahead of the scattering. At least that's my theory.
Also, presumably this dry ice use is in addition to traps, not to replace it. Use the dry ice to deny the use of the burrow and put out traps to catch those that scatter. No doubt some will get away but we're not necessarily trying to eradicate them, only control them. Those that get past the dry ice and traps will now be more likely to be caught by dogs, cats, etc.
What the problem seems to be with trapping causing the spread of disease is that too many of the rats get away. In other words it may be that they just didn't put out enough traps.
Liquid nitrogen is, by definition, a liquid. Liquids would be more difficult to handle than a solid. It's also colder, very much so, than dry ice which makes it a greater freezing hazard. If someone drops some dry ice then it's not going to flow all over the ground where it can damage property or injure people. A spill of dry ice can be managed with a shovel or gloved hand. Spill some liquid nitrogen and you are not getting it back and you are just going to have to deal with the mess.
Also, the suffocation sensation of elevated CO2 levels is a feature, not a bug. In the case of a N2 leak or spill the workers can pass out and die without knowing anything is wrong. With CO2 the people working with it have a natural aversion to its presence and therefore can leave the area before it can cause harm.
Let the rats suffer, I don't care. It's people I care about. CO2 is cheaper and safer to handle, so I say we use that.
The guy sitting next to you on the plane is getting on your nerves? SNAKES ON A PLANE!
Put them in jail and then what? Either by law or tradition the committee members of every executive agency is split between the two major parties. The number of members on these committees is always an odd number with a majority with the party in power at the time. So, we take these Republicans, toss them in jail, and then replace them with some other Republicans, at which time those Republicans can refuse to hand over the documents. Rinse, lather, repeat.
I don't know who is the bad guy here. It could be the Democrats for trying to make the Republicans look bad over something completely innocent. It could be the Republicans trying to hide wrongdoing from the Democrats. I can hear it now, if they have nothing to hide then why not share the documents? Perhaps the Republicans are aware that the Democrats are playing political games and they figure this is the best way to stop it. The Democrats have had a few bad weeks recently in the polls and it might be that the Democrats are looking for ways to make themselves look good. It's quite possible that even if the Republicans handed over everything that the Democrats asked for the Democrats would still claim something is missing.
Aren't we seeing this with the Clinton e-mail server thing going on? The Republicans will claim that e-mails are missing but the Democrats say everything was handed over. How can you prove there are no more documents to hand over? It's not like this is a bank account and someone can show there is no more money with a balance note. This is a request for documents that may have never been created. Even if they handed over every single document someone can claim documents are missing because they didn't find the dirt they are looking for.
We have an election in a few weeks, so even if someone was going to put these people in jail for contempt of Congress, or whatever, they will be out again after the election because keeping them there would be problematic politically. If Congress gets in the habit of putting commissioners in jail because they don't like what party they are in then we are going to have even bigger problems in the future.
Why would they continue to allow a VPN across this nationwide firewall?
The goal is to protect the Britons from "bad" websites as defined by the government. The first thing they want to try is to hide these sites from Britons by removing any DNS entry to them. When the government realizes that people are circumventing their firewall then I'd fully expect them to do what they can to block that traffic as well.
This is doomed to fail since, as you predict, people will find a way around it. If they are successful in gaining control of DNS servers within the UK then expect them to follow with greater controls on the internet once circumventing the firewall becomes nearly routine. This will end in one of two ways, either they succeed in killing the internet and something else replaces it, or people get exceedingly upset with the inability to communicate freely on the internet and these idiots that think they can control the internet are removed from government.
The potato was just one example. Replace with cabbage, radish, beet, peas, apple, rhubarb, wheat, corn, or whatever. The concept applies to all edible plant life. Cooking of vegetables will release more energy, and kill off disease, regardless of the vegetable under discussion. It also applies equally for ancient humans and modern humans, cooking vegetables is generally a good idea.
Of course cooked food didn't happen naturally. People figured it out and cooked it themselves. People had fire to stay warm, no? It would not be inconceivable that food happened to fall in the fire at some point. A brave and/or hungry person picked the meat out of the fire and it tasted good. At this point cooked food could spread rapidly. What follows would be the slow evolution to a species that could cook food. Those that cook food would be more likely to survive future stresses.
It seems that in time the truth does come out. That buying cherry picked scientific data will lead to a result that carries a patina of science when it is not.
Living in an area full of corn fields, windmills, and ethanol plants I hear a lot of "science" about global warming. Why would these industries not try to skew scientific results to make sure their government subsidies come in?
Am I saying that global warming is a hoax? No. Am I saying that "big wind" and "big corn" have been buying global warming data? No. What I am saying is that since we've been seeing government funded research into global warming, and a lot of political contributions and lobbying from industries like wind, corn, ethanol, electric cars, natural gas fracking, and so forth I am thinking that it is possible that global warming is in fact a hoax.
What also leads me to believe that it is possible that global warming is a hoax is the little investment in nuclear power. We have new reactors that cannot blow their top like Fukushima, Three Mile Island, or Chernobyl because they don't have cooling water that can overheat and boil explosively. These new reactors have liquid fuel that cannot melt down because it is already molten. If it gets too hot then it expands to reduce the fission rate. If it gets hotter still then it can be drained in to a cooling tank, where fission stops and passive air cooling kicks in.
If the goal was to reduce carbon output then the best way to do so is with nuclear power. Since nuclear power is stagnant here then I must assume that global warming is not a problem. If nuclear power was a problem then we'd have shut them all down by now. So nuclear power is merely allowed to exist because it is not a problem. It's not a solution because the problem isn't global warming, the problem is that people need to get paid government money, or something. It's hard to explain but it is there. A lot of people spending money to prove a "problem" exists so that more money can be spent to keep these wealthy people employed in doing something that looks like it might solve the "problem" that they didn't create in reality but in the "science". It is either a lie or an exaggeration.
The government isn't there to solve a problem, but to manage it. If the problem went away then a lot of government people would be out of a job. I expect the global warming lie to be exposed like the sugar lie. It will take decades until the data is hard to ignore. After that I expect a new nuclear renaissance. It's been over 40 years since we've stopped expanding the US nuclear power fleet. For it to replace fossil fuels we must built nuclear power at the same rate as those fossil fuels. That means something like a one new gigawatt nuclear power plant built somewhere in the world every week. Since the USA consume about 1/4th of that then a new nuclear power plant somewhere in the USA every month. Anything less and we continue to live the lie of global warming hoax or that global warming is real and we are lying to ourselves that we are doing something about it.
I won't say that sucrose is benign but IMHO it tastes better. I'll buy the cane sugar products over the HFCS when I can because, health benefits or not, I like it. If there is some truth to the benefits of sucrose then I gain that way too.
We are the result of the portion of the species that survived because of cooked meat. The ones that didn't cook their meat, or ate only a vegetarian diet, didn't survive. Saying that cooked meat did not occur naturally is nonsense, and I hope you know better and are just trying to be funny.
Evolution occurs very slowly but natural selection is an action that can happen in quite a short time. We as a species have had long periods of "convolution", where the species didn't necessarily improve toward any one path of evolution but merely developed traits through random mutation that made some portions of the population more suited to survive some future stressor. When that stressor arrived the people that knew how to cook meat were able to survive.
As you point out the cooking of meat was quite likely followed by the domestication of animals, then farming, and then what we would consider the modern era.
The question might be what stressors would favor those that could cook meat and digest it. I imagine several such stressors. Disease would be more easily controlled by those that cooked meat. The heat would kill off many pathogens and allow for greater ease of digestion. A cold period (An ice age or even a short winter freeze) would mean those that knew how to make fire would stay warm, and cooked food would give those that ate it more energy than merely warm fresh killed meat. I suspect frozen meat is inedible to anyone except those capable of heating it up, if not to cook but at least thaw.
It's not just meat that is best eaten cooked. I believe a potato is much more edible once baked, boiled, or fried. E. coli is bad for people but cooking your fruits and vegetables will make it safe from them. I recall a shortage of fresh tomatoes not too long ago because of an E. coli scare but there was no shortage of ketchup, canned tomatoes, tomato sauces, etc. because the cooking killed the bacteria.
This cooking of food had been going on for about a million years now. Long enough that there are many many people that get sick from undercooked food. It would be difficult to live with out fire and cooked food any more.
After the cooking came the convolution. After the stressors the cooked meat eaters survived. More convolution, another stressor, more survival of the fittest. In some parts of the world fitness meant milk drinkers. I like milk, I'm drinking some as I type this. This might be stretching the definition of "cooking" a bit here but pasteurizing or canning milk would seem like a good way to get protein, calories, and hydration for a lot of people.
This ability to survive on the foods we've been eating for thousands of years means we've developed features in our digestion beyond just our teeth and the size of our guts. We have a different immune system. We can tolerate lactose as adults. We also have a caloric and nutrient intake requirements that are difficult to obtain from uncooked food.
I won't say it is impossible for people to have a healthy diet that lacks cooked food. I will say that it will be expensive in time, money, and perhaps in other ways.
In some cases it's worth it even if you are not a regular Amazon customer. I found out that Amazon offers free Prime membership to college students. That came in handy for finding books for most classes and a couple movies for a literature class.
I'll do my own comparison.
Amazon:
Search for item on website on a Sunday. Place order. Item appears on doorstep Monday or Tuesday while I'm at work.
Best Buy:
Search for item on website on a Sunday. Place order. Decide if I want it that day, which means a special trip driving to the store for in store pick-up. Decide if I want it Monday, which means a short detour on my way home from work for in-store pickup. Decide if I can wait until Tuesday and not have to drive to Best Buy and have it delivered to my door while I'm out.
I believe you made the Best Buy shopping experience intentionally more difficult by starting off with having to go to the store. Just about everything they sell is on their web site. What is better is that they list things on the web site that they carry but might not be in the store nearest you.
I'm not defending Best Buy exactly, just brick and mortar stores generally. I really don't like Best Buy but around here they have a near monopoly. It's either Best Buy, a handful of mom-n-pop shops, or an hour long drive to the next county for the next big box store. When I shop I'll check Best Buy, Amazon, and a few other online stores I trust. If it's something I want right away I know I can check the websites of the brick and mortar stores around here and see if something is in stock. For example, there are two or three Target stores near me and if I want something I think they might sell I can go to their web site and see if they offer the product, at what price, and if it is in stock near me for pickup. I did just that not too long ago, ended up it wasn't in stock near me so I had it sent by post. I recall that since my order met some minimum price I paid nothing for shipping. If it was in stock then I would have gone there, got what I wanted, and while I was there I would have picked up some groceries too.
One thing I hate to do is buy clothes online. I have to see it and try it on before I buy. So when I needed a new pair of shoes I went to a couple stores to try them on. I found a pair I liked but not in the right color. No problem, they just asked for my address at checkout and mailed them to me for no additional charge. If for some reason the shoes or clothes didn't fit when I was able to try them on at home I have the option to take it directly to the store, get my refund or exchange handled immediately, and be done with it. That's what a brick and mortar store with good customer service can do that Amazon cannot right now.
I have not had to return items to Amazon yet but my brother loves shopping with Amazon. If they had a brick and mortar store where I could see their items in real life, not have to worry about mailing things back for exchange, and other conveniences of a brick and mortar store then I'd likely buy more stuff from them.