C'mon, I'm sure Bill didn't just smoke a blunt and decide to go build a new city in the desert.
I'm not so sure. Marijuana is legal in Washington, Arizona, California, and 20+ other states. Maybe one of his buddies shared his blunt while talking about retiring in the desert and Bill took the idea and ran with it. Judging by some of his past projects I suspect mind altering substances were involved in many of them as well.
If Gates and company can show off a nuclear reactor that can operate without water in the Arizona desert heat then he will be a very rich man... I mean richer than he already is.
There are already plans for reactors that can run without water. In fact the lack of water is their greatest safety feature. When exposed to heat and radiation water likes to boil, corrode metals, separate into its constituent elements, and sometimes all three at the same time... very rapidly... and then explode.
A molten salt reactor, which is one thing TerraPower is working on, operates at high temperatures. Temperatures high enough that desert heat won't bother it.
If that's part of the plan then we'll hear about it, the federal government frowns on unlicensed reactors under their jurisdiction.
Militarization of space has already happened. Militarization of space does not mean putting big guns on orbiting platforms. It can mean other military assets like communication, navigation, spying/surveying, weather (just a special kind of surveying really), and perhaps others that I have not thought of.
The US Navy has shown it has the weapons to destroy a satellite in orbit, some orbits anyway. They shot rockets from ships at sea and have at least tested the feasibility of shooting down orbiting assets from a carrier launched jet. That would be a ship, carrying a plane, with a rocket, where the rocket is tipped with the actual weapon.
I recall the US Marines looking into vehicles (airplanes? spacecraft?) that can fly high enough where it's not legally considered "airspace" above a nation. (If it's above "airspace" then is it "spacespace"?) This would allow bringing warriors and weapons to a place on Earth that would otherwise involve taking a much longer path around, or possibly be off limits as the nations surrounding the area deny permission of any military craft passing through. Is that weaponizing space? Well, it is weapons in space. Even if only briefly and "space" as defined by international law.
If we have the ability to launch from Earth, into space, and back to any place on Earth we want, then having nuclear warheads or kinetic weapons that can drop from orbit seems superfluous.
A common disposal orbit (or graveyard orbit) used for satellites that reached end of life is up high enough to be considered stable for thousands or even millions of years. Use an orbit like that, or one just beyond it to avoid all those dead satellites.
Would you really trust putting the Mona Lisa on a rocket?
That's an interesting question. People trust their one and only life with these rockets all the time. If the goal is to preserve a truly one of a kind item then perhaps putting them in orbit might not be wise, even if people trust them with their lives. For things like important texts, movies, music, and so on, then a copy could be sent.
Assuming space tourism is a thing in the not too distant future I can imagine people going through the time and expense of using private funds to put small historical archives into orbit. These archives might not be intended to be visited by people, at least not at first. They might just be something we can load data to and read back by radio. People might make visiting these archive something of a hobby or perhaps a religious rite. If people visit them then bringing fuel for orbit correction is pretty trivial. What is just as likely is the vehicle that visits will make a habit of giving a boost or correction with every visit, no fuel or engines on board needed.
In fact the use of a visiting vehicle providing the boosts needed might actually be preferable. The engines used for the boost will always be "new" and maintained by what I can assume will always be better equipped ground facilities. There would not be any large stores of fuel that could burn and threaten the artifacts. If there is a problem with the engines where it can threaten the orbiting museum then break the connection and let the vehicle with the busted engine fly or fall away.
Even in a lower orbit this might be nice to have. It might need a boost every month or so to avoid breaking up in the atmosphere but if people visit regularly then boosts could be applied with every visiting spacecraft. It would be free from damage by weather and war, or at least much more protected than perhaps many places on Earth's surface.
We have the technology for this already, all that is really holding this back is the cost of the energy. Once we have reusable space vehicles then a trip would be much like a long plane trip in costs.
And of course, by 2040 museums have transformed into hybrid institutions like "museum schools" and "well-being and cognitive health centers" that are both run by museums.
I don't know why I thought this but at some point I found it odd that we have words that separate places that store items of historical and cultural significance. I'm thinking of libraries, museums, schools, churches, monuments, and perhaps even hospitals. Libraries, especially those that are larger and older, have for a long been as much a museum as a place for books. They'll let people view and borrow not just books but also artwork, maps, videos, and music. Often a library will display artwork, either among the books or in a separated area that is really just a small museum attached to the library.
Schools are, in effect, just an extension of a library or museum. Education is more formalized, of course, but it's really mostly about a "curator" lecturing and discussing a topic of history, culture, science, or religion that they have specialized in. A church is a museum for many intents and purposes. Some churches ARE a museum, where people may visit freely to view the artwork and such when services are not being held. There's churches (or chapels rather) in schools, schools in churches, libraries in churches, and museums in them all.
Even when it comes to things like health people will go to a church for distress or depression, a mental health issue, to talk to a religious figure (animate or inanimate). Historically physical and mental health have been big things within every religion. Many religious rituals are based on eating healthy, like keeping kosher. The word "university" comes from a religious custom or construct. What they called a "university" long ago we'd call a "seminary" today. If you wanted to be a physician then you'd be expected to go to university and study medicine along with "universal" knowledge contained in religious texts.
We've seen this convergence and blurring of what defines a library and museum for a long time. I expect further convergence and blurring in the future. I don't expect a complete convergence by 2040. I don't know if such a complete convergence is possible, we cannot expect one building, or campus of buildings, to be all things to all people. If we don't create new words for this convergence then the meaning of the words we use today will evolve a new meaning, like how universities are most often secular institutions but were highly religious long ago.
I can just imagine someone foreign to modern society being baffled at this arbitrary separation of structures like I have become baffled. I imagine an alien from another planet landing on Earth and seeing "churches" everywhere and wondering why we keep the books from the statues, the lecture halls from the worship halls, schools separated from hospitals, and the university separate from the seminary.
There's a reason that he didn't actually have access to a machine gun.
Tell me something, what's the difference between a machine gun and a shotgun? This is a serious question, I'll explain.
One of the most popular guns to ban is the MAC-10. It's a "machine pistol" capable of holding a 30 round magazine of 9mm ammunition and firing them rapidly with a single pull of the trigger. Now compare this to a popular shotgun, the JIC 500, this is a pistol grip shotgun popular for survival hunting, law enforcement, and more. A common variant, and only slightly harder to get legally, is cut down to be about the size of that MAC-10.
Common 12 gauge buckshot shells will have eight 9mm pellets. This JIC 500 can hold 6 of these shells in the "long" version, and 4 shells in the pistol sized version. 4 x 8 = 32, so the MAC-10 and this shotgun hold effectively the same number of 9mm pellets. Both expel these pellets of similar mass and size at roughly 1200 feet per second, about the speed of sound. With both a person can send 8 of these pellets in the same general scattershot direction with a single pull of the trigger. A trained person can use either to send all 30-ish pellets with considerable speed and accuracy, not that either require considerable training to do this.
So why is one banned and not the other?
So, here's an idea. Let's reduce drug laws.
Sure, then let's reduce the gun laws too. If the gun laws followed from the drug laws then getting rid of the drugs laws should mean not needing the gun laws either.
If even half of the claims of 3D printing is to be believed then people will be able to print their own machine guns at home in just a few years. Soon people will buy a 3D printer for Christmas and have a working machine gun by New Year's Eve.
Gun control only disarms those that are most in need of weapons to defend themselves, the criminals will be able to get whatever they want. But then disarming the innocent seems to be the point of gun control from the start, no?
How can we have the device accurately and securely track time over such long periods? Keeping track of 48 hours is trivial, most cell phone batteries will last that long if not used, even a "dead" battery will keep an internal clock running for a couple days. If the battery truly runs dead then it assumes the 48 hour timeout period has passed.
About the only way I can think of on how to enforce a month or year long timeout is some kind of atomic battery, like those used in pacemakers until the material used for the power source got too expensive (even for a medical device) and batteries improved. Time can be tracked not just by keeping a clock running but by measuring the decay of the radioactive material that runs the power source.
Even that's not above being hacked by a determined person or group with sufficient resources. Cracking open the phone and doing things like modifying the clock and/or swapping out the power supply could defeat this.
I will say that owning a phone, or similar portable computing and communications device, that has an internal atomic clock and multi-year battery life would be totally awesome.
If someone buys a dozen guns in a year, then perhaps he should have a conversation with someone to explain exactly what he is doing with them all. Similarly as with a ton of ammo.
Let's think this through.
I heard of professional shotgun sport competitors having to jump through hoops to get the ammunition they need. I think it was California that wanted to pass a law that a person could not buy more than some stupid low level of ammunition each month unless they were a licensed firearms dealer. We've seen this at the federal level too, firearm collectors were buying "too many" guns so the ATF put some limit on this and required them to get a firearm dealer license. So, people got their license to buy firearms. We've already seen complaints that the ATF does not have the manpower to inspect every licensed gun dealer for compliance. Well, then make only actual gun dealers be licensed. If a person needs a license to sell Grandpa's shotguns then you've now created the problem of people getting a license to sell even a handful of firearms and not being able to manage it, or people just not bothering with the license and selling them anyway.
Also, who watches the watchmen? The ATF has been caught violating their own rules, telling licensed dealers to sell to known criminals or risk losing their license. It's called Operation Fast and Furious, look it up.
All gun control does is disarm those most in need of the guns, but then that has been the whole point of gun control, has it not?
You think people haven't tried? The US federal government doesn't even have rules in place to allow them to license a thorium reactor. They'll claim that no thorium reactor has been proven safe so they can't issue a license. Well, it's hard to prove one safe if no license is ever issued.
We've written ourselves into a comedy novel. Except it's not funny when it's real life.
In other words: it is close to impossible to run a country, or controlled grid, with nukes alone. You need pumped storage for balancing power, and/or gas turbines.
First, there's not too many people that will claim we can or should run the grid on nuclear power alone.
Second, we'll hear people claim that we can run a grid on wind and solar alone. How? With storage. But you just defined "alone" as lacking storage. How would wind and solar work without storage? You dump your energy? That's wasteful, which just means it'd be expensive. Without storage wind and solar is just as useless as nuclear power.
If we allow energy storage, like what advocates for wind and solar do, then we can in fact run a controlled grid on nuclear power "alone". We can say the grid is powered by nuclear alone because no energy is added except from nuclear, the storage just evens out the load so nuclear can match the load.
To argue that nuclear power cannot power the grid alone means that wind and solar cannot power the grid alone. I believe you should drop this argument if you want to claim wind and solar are better than nuclear power, it does not serve you.
Do I have this right? We have "progressive" organizations (called such in the article) that fought hard for electronic voting machines. Trump gets elected. Now they want paper.
There's been suspicions among "right wing" groups that these "progressives" have been using absentee voting and electronic voting machines to make vote fraud easier. The progressive candidates get their head handed to them on a platter in an election a year ago and NOW they think electronic voting is a bad idea?
There's a part of me that thinks these people that have been participating in voter fraud realized that the opposition could in fact be also participating in fraud. To actually prove there was fraud though requires a paper trail. Electronic voting means no paper trail.
Regardless of why these "progressive" groups got the message I'm just glad they did.
I'm not saying any fraud has in fact happened, only that everyone seems to be accusing the other of participating in fraud.
(What makes these people so "progressive" anyway? What are they progressing towards? Progress implies a path to take, or some goal to achieve, I'm not sure what that is though.)
That's all great but meaningless unless compared to an alternative. Nuclear power is not cheap, but it costs less than living in the dark. We are running out of options and a lot of the complaints you've made can be addressed with more development of the technology. A big one you raised is the need for a large and complex containment structure. That's there to contain a steam explosion. We can fix that by not using water as a coolant. What else is there? Lots of things, and we won't know which one is best until we try them in real and actual nuclear reactors.
Again, nuclear is expensive. It's going to stay expensive unless we spend the time and resources to figure out how to make it cheaper. Kind of like how we make wind mills and solar collectors cheaper by building more of them.
We have those regulations because nuclear isn't safe even with them, but certainly not without them. You shouldn't complain about regulations designed to keep the land livable, since you live on the land.
You might live on the land but *I* live in the clouds.
That reminds me of something. Growing up on the farm we had four tractors. One of which had a block heater, starter fluid injector, AND glow plugs. Dad ordered it like this because we needed this tractor to start, even in the coldest weather because the animals needed to get fed. I asked him once, what if we could not start that tractor? He said then perhaps we didn't need to feed the cattle that day. I took that to mean the animals would have frozen to death.
My little story has next to nothing to do with your comment, but then you said nothing worth replying to. I thought I'd reply anyway to share since your comment brought it to mind. Have a nice day.
I was just making an observation on an odd quirk in ADA law as well as poking fun at the "top one percent" protesters. As a teen I had to learn to duck under some doorways, because there was a time I wasn't six feet five inches tall. It took a few bumps on the head to figure out that doors are made to fit 99% of the population and I had grown to be outside that 99%. It sometimes sucks being as tall as I am but I manage just fine most the time.
By saying I'm "too stupid to duck" you are effectively mocking a younger version of myself. If you see a tall young teen knock his head into a door frame then would it be your immediate reaction to point and laugh?
That's a nice rant. Here's the deal though. We can use fossil fuels or build nuclear power plants. People claim that solar power will be as cheap and reliable as coal in 5 years. Okay, so what do we do for the next five years? It's burn coal or develop nuclear power. Then what happens if these promises of cheap solar energy doesn't happen? Then we're burning coal or using nuclear power.
At least if we start with nuclear power now we have something low carbon to fall back on if solar doesn't meet it's promises of being cheap. Burning coal until solar gets cheap could mean burning coal until the sun goes out, and then for a few years after.
And if they fail all in the same way, the people around them are...
... going to shut it down and fix it. This fix will also be mass produced and therefore inexpensive to implement.
You seem to think that a nuclear power plant can only fail in only one way, a mushroom cloud of radioactive debris. That's not how they work. Most every spectacular failure we've seen in a nuclear power plant is because they are all unique, no one can ever learn where all the gremlins are, and if a problem is found the fix is almost always very expensive because no other device in the world is just like this one. Which means when problems are found they might not get fixed.
We build devices with similar complexity, cost, and potential threat to life if they fail spectacularly. We call them passenger jets. One major difference between a passenger jet and a nuclear reactor is the reactor isn't six miles in the air with no where to land for hundreds of miles.
I gave you my answer, the market is always looking for "better" energy so all we have to do is allow the market to do this. In this case "better" is defined as being both low CO2 and low cost.
They aren't really cheaper if you would also include the cost of higher CO2 concentration and the effects it has on the global climate. A simple solution would be to calculate those costs, and add them to fossil fuel prices using a tax. At the same time, income taxes should be reduced by the same amount to keep it budget neutral.
Let me get this straight... I pay a tax because my utility chose to use dirty coal. But since this is a burden on the taxpayer the government pays me the difference on my income taxes. How is this an incentive to get off coal again? The utility doesn't give a shit, they want to sell cheap and reliable energy. If this means paying a tax then they pay a tax. So long as wind and solar are unreliable there is a cost to that, including the fuel to keep their boilers hot for when the sun sets and the wind stops.
This is not a problem that taxation can fix. We need cheap, low carbon, reliable, and safe energy. We have that, it's nuclear fission. Or rather, we'd have it if the government allowed it.
If you go to the last page of the report you linked to, where there is a nice chart that summarizes everything, tell me what you see? I see LCOE (levelized cost of energy/electricity) of natural gas, hydro, solar PV, and onshore wind being the cheapest, as I suspect most people expect. Geothermal costs are low too, but I'm not sure that can be used just anywhere.
Look at the LACE (levelized avoided cost of energy/electricity) which is the more complex analysis, everything evens out, except onshore wind wins on being 10% cheaper and solar loses on being 10% or 15% more expensive. If people want their energy to be cheap and low CO2 then it's wind, hydro, and nuclear. The report you gave just shows what I stated before.
Even with the simple LCOE numbers we see nuclear cheaper than coal, solar thermal, and offshore wind. As soon as people run out of rooftops to slap PV panels to, rivers to dam, and land to plant windmills, what are they supposed to do? Nuclear. If we are replacing natural gas because of it's CO2 output then we are going to hit a place where it is a choice between energy prices going up or nuclear.
If you think it's impossible to run out of rooftops and rivers then come out to the US Midwest where I live. Not a lot of sun and flowing water right now, and winter is just getting started.
No, I'm pointing out the difference an inch can make. Once I grew to be tall enough to start hitting the tops of doors with my head I had to learn when to duck, and then months later find myself hitting my head where I hadn't before. But that's only part of the problem.
I'm just far enough from the norm that I'll fit most places but not all. Mostly my complaint is about people one inch "too short" have it easy compared to people like myself who are one inch "too tall". One example is having my assigned desk and chair at work too short for me. A person on the short end of the height scale have the ADA to protect them from having such an uncomfortable arrangement. I have no such protection in law. I had to rely on the company policies of keeping an ergonomic workplace.
If I was in this Ford factory then I might not fit in this work harness they use. I suspect this is more than likely due to my slightly longer arms, that's by proportion not just by my height. I would not have protection under the ADA for Ford to make any accommodations. Someone under 5 feet would have ADA protections. Ford might be forced to find the short person a different job they could do, or fashion a special harness for them. I might simply lose my job.
I have people tell me, "I wish I was as tall as you." I'll reply, sometimes only to myself, "No, you don't."
One thing about being short is that such people can find clothes, children's clothes but they exist. I don't see too many tall women complain about finding clothes that fit. Their dresses might be shorter on them, they can buy men's clothes (which can be stylish regardless of the practicality), and those cropped pants that are (or were) the style don't look silly if another inch or two shorter. I've been finding it easier to get clothes every year but my selections are always limited, for example a style of carpenter jeans I like will come in 7 colors in most sizes but in "tall" they only come in 4.
Did you even read the article you linked to? Under the solutions section it explains how non-government action and privatization can solve this.
This is really a problem of the "bad" energy being cheaper than the "good" energy. If the "good" energy is cheaper than the "bad" energy then the "good" replaces the "bad" naturally. I keep hearing on how solar energy will be cheaper than everything else in 5 years, even without the current subsidies, so I guess all we have to do is wait for the problem to solve itself. We won't need any more government action at that point.
Yep, in 5 years all of our global warming problems will be solved. At that point I'll just sell my current SUV to be scrapped for it's iron and I'll buy a new hydrogen-electric hybrid SUV. The local utility will rent my roof for its solar collectors, they'll be paying me for my energy. Utopia, just 5 years away and the government needs to do nothing.
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C'mon, I'm sure Bill didn't just smoke a blunt and decide to go build a new city in the desert.
I'm not so sure. Marijuana is legal in Washington, Arizona, California, and 20+ other states. Maybe one of his buddies shared his blunt while talking about retiring in the desert and Bill took the idea and ran with it. Judging by some of his past projects I suspect mind altering substances were involved in many of them as well.
If Gates and company can show off a nuclear reactor that can operate without water in the Arizona desert heat then he will be a very rich man... I mean richer than he already is.
There are already plans for reactors that can run without water. In fact the lack of water is their greatest safety feature. When exposed to heat and radiation water likes to boil, corrode metals, separate into its constituent elements, and sometimes all three at the same time... very rapidly... and then explode.
A molten salt reactor, which is one thing TerraPower is working on, operates at high temperatures. Temperatures high enough that desert heat won't bother it.
If that's part of the plan then we'll hear about it, the federal government frowns on unlicensed reactors under their jurisdiction.
Looks like all that time I spent learning the binary language of moisture vaporators is finally going to come in pay off.
Now all you need is a scrawny and whiny teenager that knows how to swap out bad motivators in maintenance driods.
Dammit! You ruined my Space Cowboys joke!
Militarization of space has already happened. Militarization of space does not mean putting big guns on orbiting platforms. It can mean other military assets like communication, navigation, spying/surveying, weather (just a special kind of surveying really), and perhaps others that I have not thought of.
The US Navy has shown it has the weapons to destroy a satellite in orbit, some orbits anyway. They shot rockets from ships at sea and have at least tested the feasibility of shooting down orbiting assets from a carrier launched jet. That would be a ship, carrying a plane, with a rocket, where the rocket is tipped with the actual weapon.
I recall the US Marines looking into vehicles (airplanes? spacecraft?) that can fly high enough where it's not legally considered "airspace" above a nation. (If it's above "airspace" then is it "spacespace"?) This would allow bringing warriors and weapons to a place on Earth that would otherwise involve taking a much longer path around, or possibly be off limits as the nations surrounding the area deny permission of any military craft passing through. Is that weaponizing space? Well, it is weapons in space. Even if only briefly and "space" as defined by international law.
If we have the ability to launch from Earth, into space, and back to any place on Earth we want, then having nuclear warheads or kinetic weapons that can drop from orbit seems superfluous.
A common disposal orbit (or graveyard orbit) used for satellites that reached end of life is up high enough to be considered stable for thousands or even millions of years. Use an orbit like that, or one just beyond it to avoid all those dead satellites.
Would you really trust putting the Mona Lisa on a rocket?
That's an interesting question. People trust their one and only life with these rockets all the time. If the goal is to preserve a truly one of a kind item then perhaps putting them in orbit might not be wise, even if people trust them with their lives. For things like important texts, movies, music, and so on, then a copy could be sent.
Assuming space tourism is a thing in the not too distant future I can imagine people going through the time and expense of using private funds to put small historical archives into orbit. These archives might not be intended to be visited by people, at least not at first. They might just be something we can load data to and read back by radio. People might make visiting these archive something of a hobby or perhaps a religious rite. If people visit them then bringing fuel for orbit correction is pretty trivial. What is just as likely is the vehicle that visits will make a habit of giving a boost or correction with every visit, no fuel or engines on board needed.
In fact the use of a visiting vehicle providing the boosts needed might actually be preferable. The engines used for the boost will always be "new" and maintained by what I can assume will always be better equipped ground facilities. There would not be any large stores of fuel that could burn and threaten the artifacts. If there is a problem with the engines where it can threaten the orbiting museum then break the connection and let the vehicle with the busted engine fly or fall away.
Even in a lower orbit this might be nice to have. It might need a boost every month or so to avoid breaking up in the atmosphere but if people visit regularly then boosts could be applied with every visiting spacecraft. It would be free from damage by weather and war, or at least much more protected than perhaps many places on Earth's surface.
We have the technology for this already, all that is really holding this back is the cost of the energy. Once we have reusable space vehicles then a trip would be much like a long plane trip in costs.
And of course, by 2040 museums have transformed into hybrid institutions like "museum schools" and "well-being and cognitive health centers" that are both run by museums.
I don't know why I thought this but at some point I found it odd that we have words that separate places that store items of historical and cultural significance. I'm thinking of libraries, museums, schools, churches, monuments, and perhaps even hospitals. Libraries, especially those that are larger and older, have for a long been as much a museum as a place for books. They'll let people view and borrow not just books but also artwork, maps, videos, and music. Often a library will display artwork, either among the books or in a separated area that is really just a small museum attached to the library.
Schools are, in effect, just an extension of a library or museum. Education is more formalized, of course, but it's really mostly about a "curator" lecturing and discussing a topic of history, culture, science, or religion that they have specialized in. A church is a museum for many intents and purposes. Some churches ARE a museum, where people may visit freely to view the artwork and such when services are not being held. There's churches (or chapels rather) in schools, schools in churches, libraries in churches, and museums in them all.
Even when it comes to things like health people will go to a church for distress or depression, a mental health issue, to talk to a religious figure (animate or inanimate). Historically physical and mental health have been big things within every religion. Many religious rituals are based on eating healthy, like keeping kosher. The word "university" comes from a religious custom or construct. What they called a "university" long ago we'd call a "seminary" today. If you wanted to be a physician then you'd be expected to go to university and study medicine along with "universal" knowledge contained in religious texts.
We've seen this convergence and blurring of what defines a library and museum for a long time. I expect further convergence and blurring in the future. I don't expect a complete convergence by 2040. I don't know if such a complete convergence is possible, we cannot expect one building, or campus of buildings, to be all things to all people. If we don't create new words for this convergence then the meaning of the words we use today will evolve a new meaning, like how universities are most often secular institutions but were highly religious long ago.
I can just imagine someone foreign to modern society being baffled at this arbitrary separation of structures like I have become baffled. I imagine an alien from another planet landing on Earth and seeing "churches" everywhere and wondering why we keep the books from the statues, the lecture halls from the worship halls, schools separated from hospitals, and the university separate from the seminary.
There's a reason that he didn't actually have access to a machine gun.
Tell me something, what's the difference between a machine gun and a shotgun? This is a serious question, I'll explain.
One of the most popular guns to ban is the MAC-10. It's a "machine pistol" capable of holding a 30 round magazine of 9mm ammunition and firing them rapidly with a single pull of the trigger. Now compare this to a popular shotgun, the JIC 500, this is a pistol grip shotgun popular for survival hunting, law enforcement, and more. A common variant, and only slightly harder to get legally, is cut down to be about the size of that MAC-10.
Common 12 gauge buckshot shells will have eight 9mm pellets. This JIC 500 can hold 6 of these shells in the "long" version, and 4 shells in the pistol sized version. 4 x 8 = 32, so the MAC-10 and this shotgun hold effectively the same number of 9mm pellets. Both expel these pellets of similar mass and size at roughly 1200 feet per second, about the speed of sound. With both a person can send 8 of these pellets in the same general scattershot direction with a single pull of the trigger. A trained person can use either to send all 30-ish pellets with considerable speed and accuracy, not that either require considerable training to do this.
So why is one banned and not the other?
So, here's an idea. Let's reduce drug laws.
Sure, then let's reduce the gun laws too. If the gun laws followed from the drug laws then getting rid of the drugs laws should mean not needing the gun laws either.
If even half of the claims of 3D printing is to be believed then people will be able to print their own machine guns at home in just a few years. Soon people will buy a 3D printer for Christmas and have a working machine gun by New Year's Eve.
Gun control only disarms those that are most in need of weapons to defend themselves, the criminals will be able to get whatever they want. But then disarming the innocent seems to be the point of gun control from the start, no?
How can we have the device accurately and securely track time over such long periods? Keeping track of 48 hours is trivial, most cell phone batteries will last that long if not used, even a "dead" battery will keep an internal clock running for a couple days. If the battery truly runs dead then it assumes the 48 hour timeout period has passed.
About the only way I can think of on how to enforce a month or year long timeout is some kind of atomic battery, like those used in pacemakers until the material used for the power source got too expensive (even for a medical device) and batteries improved. Time can be tracked not just by keeping a clock running but by measuring the decay of the radioactive material that runs the power source.
Even that's not above being hacked by a determined person or group with sufficient resources. Cracking open the phone and doing things like modifying the clock and/or swapping out the power supply could defeat this.
I will say that owning a phone, or similar portable computing and communications device, that has an internal atomic clock and multi-year battery life would be totally awesome.
If someone buys a dozen guns in a year, then perhaps he should have a conversation with someone to explain exactly what he is doing with them all. Similarly as with a ton of ammo.
Let's think this through.
I heard of professional shotgun sport competitors having to jump through hoops to get the ammunition they need. I think it was California that wanted to pass a law that a person could not buy more than some stupid low level of ammunition each month unless they were a licensed firearms dealer. We've seen this at the federal level too, firearm collectors were buying "too many" guns so the ATF put some limit on this and required them to get a firearm dealer license. So, people got their license to buy firearms. We've already seen complaints that the ATF does not have the manpower to inspect every licensed gun dealer for compliance. Well, then make only actual gun dealers be licensed. If a person needs a license to sell Grandpa's shotguns then you've now created the problem of people getting a license to sell even a handful of firearms and not being able to manage it, or people just not bothering with the license and selling them anyway.
Also, who watches the watchmen? The ATF has been caught violating their own rules, telling licensed dealers to sell to known criminals or risk losing their license. It's called Operation Fast and Furious, look it up.
All gun control does is disarm those most in need of the guns, but then that has been the whole point of gun control, has it not?
You think people haven't tried? The US federal government doesn't even have rules in place to allow them to license a thorium reactor. They'll claim that no thorium reactor has been proven safe so they can't issue a license. Well, it's hard to prove one safe if no license is ever issued.
We've written ourselves into a comedy novel. Except it's not funny when it's real life.
In other words: it is close to impossible to run a country, or controlled grid, with nukes alone. You need pumped storage for balancing power, and/or gas turbines.
First, there's not too many people that will claim we can or should run the grid on nuclear power alone.
Second, we'll hear people claim that we can run a grid on wind and solar alone. How? With storage. But you just defined "alone" as lacking storage. How would wind and solar work without storage? You dump your energy? That's wasteful, which just means it'd be expensive. Without storage wind and solar is just as useless as nuclear power.
If we allow energy storage, like what advocates for wind and solar do, then we can in fact run a controlled grid on nuclear power "alone". We can say the grid is powered by nuclear alone because no energy is added except from nuclear, the storage just evens out the load so nuclear can match the load.
To argue that nuclear power cannot power the grid alone means that wind and solar cannot power the grid alone. I believe you should drop this argument if you want to claim wind and solar are better than nuclear power, it does not serve you.
Do I have this right? We have "progressive" organizations (called such in the article) that fought hard for electronic voting machines. Trump gets elected. Now they want paper.
There's been suspicions among "right wing" groups that these "progressives" have been using absentee voting and electronic voting machines to make vote fraud easier. The progressive candidates get their head handed to them on a platter in an election a year ago and NOW they think electronic voting is a bad idea?
There's a part of me that thinks these people that have been participating in voter fraud realized that the opposition could in fact be also participating in fraud. To actually prove there was fraud though requires a paper trail. Electronic voting means no paper trail.
Regardless of why these "progressive" groups got the message I'm just glad they did.
I'm not saying any fraud has in fact happened, only that everyone seems to be accusing the other of participating in fraud.
(What makes these people so "progressive" anyway? What are they progressing towards? Progress implies a path to take, or some goal to achieve, I'm not sure what that is though.)
You just gave an example on how CFL subsidies failed, and did so better than I had. Thanks.
That's all great but meaningless unless compared to an alternative. Nuclear power is not cheap, but it costs less than living in the dark. We are running out of options and a lot of the complaints you've made can be addressed with more development of the technology. A big one you raised is the need for a large and complex containment structure. That's there to contain a steam explosion. We can fix that by not using water as a coolant. What else is there? Lots of things, and we won't know which one is best until we try them in real and actual nuclear reactors.
Again, nuclear is expensive. It's going to stay expensive unless we spend the time and resources to figure out how to make it cheaper. Kind of like how we make wind mills and solar collectors cheaper by building more of them.
We have those regulations because nuclear isn't safe even with them, but certainly not without them. You shouldn't complain about regulations designed to keep the land livable, since you live on the land.
You might live on the land but *I* live in the clouds.
Floaty floating clouds.
High up in the sky.
Just living on happy happy clouds.
That reminds me of something. Growing up on the farm we had four tractors. One of which had a block heater, starter fluid injector, AND glow plugs. Dad ordered it like this because we needed this tractor to start, even in the coldest weather because the animals needed to get fed. I asked him once, what if we could not start that tractor? He said then perhaps we didn't need to feed the cattle that day. I took that to mean the animals would have frozen to death.
My little story has next to nothing to do with your comment, but then you said nothing worth replying to. I thought I'd reply anyway to share since your comment brought it to mind. Have a nice day.
Who pissed in your Cheerios?
I was just making an observation on an odd quirk in ADA law as well as poking fun at the "top one percent" protesters. As a teen I had to learn to duck under some doorways, because there was a time I wasn't six feet five inches tall. It took a few bumps on the head to figure out that doors are made to fit 99% of the population and I had grown to be outside that 99%. It sometimes sucks being as tall as I am but I manage just fine most the time.
By saying I'm "too stupid to duck" you are effectively mocking a younger version of myself. If you see a tall young teen knock his head into a door frame then would it be your immediate reaction to point and laugh?
Grow up.
That's a nice rant. Here's the deal though. We can use fossil fuels or build nuclear power plants. People claim that solar power will be as cheap and reliable as coal in 5 years. Okay, so what do we do for the next five years? It's burn coal or develop nuclear power. Then what happens if these promises of cheap solar energy doesn't happen? Then we're burning coal or using nuclear power.
At least if we start with nuclear power now we have something low carbon to fall back on if solar doesn't meet it's promises of being cheap. Burning coal until solar gets cheap could mean burning coal until the sun goes out, and then for a few years after.
And if they fail all in the same way, the people around them are ...
... going to shut it down and fix it. This fix will also be mass produced and therefore inexpensive to implement.
You seem to think that a nuclear power plant can only fail in only one way, a mushroom cloud of radioactive debris. That's not how they work. Most every spectacular failure we've seen in a nuclear power plant is because they are all unique, no one can ever learn where all the gremlins are, and if a problem is found the fix is almost always very expensive because no other device in the world is just like this one. Which means when problems are found they might not get fixed.
We build devices with similar complexity, cost, and potential threat to life if they fail spectacularly. We call them passenger jets. One major difference between a passenger jet and a nuclear reactor is the reactor isn't six miles in the air with no where to land for hundreds of miles.
And how would that work for the global climate ?
I gave you my answer, the market is always looking for "better" energy so all we have to do is allow the market to do this. In this case "better" is defined as being both low CO2 and low cost.
They aren't really cheaper if you would also include the cost of higher CO2 concentration and the effects it has on the global climate. A simple solution would be to calculate those costs, and add them to fossil fuel prices using a tax. At the same time, income taxes should be reduced by the same amount to keep it budget neutral.
Let me get this straight... I pay a tax because my utility chose to use dirty coal. But since this is a burden on the taxpayer the government pays me the difference on my income taxes. How is this an incentive to get off coal again? The utility doesn't give a shit, they want to sell cheap and reliable energy. If this means paying a tax then they pay a tax. So long as wind and solar are unreliable there is a cost to that, including the fuel to keep their boilers hot for when the sun sets and the wind stops.
This is not a problem that taxation can fix. We need cheap, low carbon, reliable, and safe energy. We have that, it's nuclear fission. Or rather, we'd have it if the government allowed it.
If you go to the last page of the report you linked to, where there is a nice chart that summarizes everything, tell me what you see? I see LCOE (levelized cost of energy/electricity) of natural gas, hydro, solar PV, and onshore wind being the cheapest, as I suspect most people expect. Geothermal costs are low too, but I'm not sure that can be used just anywhere.
Look at the LACE (levelized avoided cost of energy/electricity) which is the more complex analysis, everything evens out, except onshore wind wins on being 10% cheaper and solar loses on being 10% or 15% more expensive. If people want their energy to be cheap and low CO2 then it's wind, hydro, and nuclear. The report you gave just shows what I stated before.
Even with the simple LCOE numbers we see nuclear cheaper than coal, solar thermal, and offshore wind. As soon as people run out of rooftops to slap PV panels to, rivers to dam, and land to plant windmills, what are they supposed to do? Nuclear. If we are replacing natural gas because of it's CO2 output then we are going to hit a place where it is a choice between energy prices going up or nuclear.
If you think it's impossible to run out of rooftops and rivers then come out to the US Midwest where I live. Not a lot of sun and flowing water right now, and winter is just getting started.
No, I'm pointing out the difference an inch can make. Once I grew to be tall enough to start hitting the tops of doors with my head I had to learn when to duck, and then months later find myself hitting my head where I hadn't before. But that's only part of the problem.
I'm just far enough from the norm that I'll fit most places but not all. Mostly my complaint is about people one inch "too short" have it easy compared to people like myself who are one inch "too tall". One example is having my assigned desk and chair at work too short for me. A person on the short end of the height scale have the ADA to protect them from having such an uncomfortable arrangement. I have no such protection in law. I had to rely on the company policies of keeping an ergonomic workplace.
If I was in this Ford factory then I might not fit in this work harness they use. I suspect this is more than likely due to my slightly longer arms, that's by proportion not just by my height. I would not have protection under the ADA for Ford to make any accommodations. Someone under 5 feet would have ADA protections. Ford might be forced to find the short person a different job they could do, or fashion a special harness for them. I might simply lose my job.
I have people tell me, "I wish I was as tall as you." I'll reply, sometimes only to myself, "No, you don't."
Right, that would be "adult population".
One thing about being short is that such people can find clothes, children's clothes but they exist. I don't see too many tall women complain about finding clothes that fit. Their dresses might be shorter on them, they can buy men's clothes (which can be stylish regardless of the practicality), and those cropped pants that are (or were) the style don't look silly if another inch or two shorter. I've been finding it easier to get clothes every year but my selections are always limited, for example a style of carpenter jeans I like will come in 7 colors in most sizes but in "tall" they only come in 4.
Drill, baby, drill!
Did you even read the article you linked to? Under the solutions section it explains how non-government action and privatization can solve this.
This is really a problem of the "bad" energy being cheaper than the "good" energy. If the "good" energy is cheaper than the "bad" energy then the "good" replaces the "bad" naturally. I keep hearing on how solar energy will be cheaper than everything else in 5 years, even without the current subsidies, so I guess all we have to do is wait for the problem to solve itself. We won't need any more government action at that point.
Yep, in 5 years all of our global warming problems will be solved. At that point I'll just sell my current SUV to be scrapped for it's iron and I'll buy a new hydrogen-electric hybrid SUV. The local utility will rent my roof for its solar collectors, they'll be paying me for my energy. Utopia, just 5 years away and the government needs to do nothing.