That won't happen - all the guy has to do is rape any virgin and by Sharia law she is his new wife. If she refuses, she gets stoned to death and he's free to rape some other virgin. Technically they are BOTH supposed to be stoned to death for adultery, but usually the man doesn't refuse and is therefore given a pass.
Anything based on ancient Hebrew law, and that includes the Old Testament has that in it. The New Testament basically says forget about those old rules, but if the ten commandments were really sent by God, then the Old Testament god can't be the New Testament god (changing the letter g to lower case intentionally - this implies polytheism). The 10 commandments says quite clearly that Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery, defined at the time as sex with a non-virgin (later in Kings there is some leeway given for widows).
Funny - I have the same setup. The main thing I hate about the Q6600 is it lacks hardware virtualization, and I've been tempted to upgrade for that reason alone, but since my laptop has it, I went from a pressing need to upgrade to a "it'd be nice."
I think this year is going to be vacation priority - will fix CPU early next year, then batten down the hatches for the coming economic depression and US currency collapse (yeah, I have no faith in either Romney or Obama to prevent this, hedging on commodities like every other sane person).
I'm still running a Q6600 on my main box with a nVidia 560 Ti GPU. For most GPU bound games (read, shooters) I have no issues with it at all. For RPGs like Skyrim it tended to get CPU bound, but not so bad that I felt I had to update it today, and it played the Guild Wars 2 beta much better than my laptop with an i7 2630 and nVidia 560M (better CPU, GPU is 50%+ slower than the Ti and quite a bit slower than the 560, despite the similar name).
And the latest fad of police using license plate scanners to Id where your vehicle has been, and often this is public record - anyone can track you this way. Who knows if they have facial recognition in place as well?
A few other things - make sure any distinguishing features are covered, such as tattoos, piercings, etc. Grow a beard if male, or remove the beard if you have one, and add cheap sunglasses and a baseball cap, but once out of the area, discard both and replace at least the sunglasses. If possible, change your hairstyle. Buses and trains are your friend, cars are not. Get what cash you can from an ATM and leave the area as quickly as possible. Don't use cards of any kind, not just credit cards - frequent shopper cards also can be used to track your location, for instance, in addition to your buying habits. Don't call anyone unless you buy a burner phone, and if you use that, use it in a crowded place and then throw it away and leave the area as quickly as possible. Get out of urban centers - too much surveillance - catching a bus out of town probably is a good option. Make sure you don't have a bug on your person - especially check shoes where a cavity could be drilled out and larger tracking bugs could be placed.
It doesn't matter that they are or are not scientists - they should know their science policy. If they don't know, they can either say they have no opinion or ask for a clarification and choose their policy. Very specific, targeted questions could be used to find out what they even know, like have you heard of LFTR, and what do you think? I don't know if either of them know anything about it, but that would answer my question. I'd also like to know if they are open to exploring it or not.
And yes, the worry from environmentalists is not that wind farm kill birds, which are a dime a dozen in many cases, but that it kills great birds like bald eagles, which are relatively rare.
LFTR actually makes an excellent desalination plant. In fact, Alvin Weinberg's dream was to make desalination plants using a much larger version of his MSRE (LFTR is a successor that solves corrosion issues by adding a blanket) he ran for four years. That was until Nixon shut him up by firing him because his buddies in the nuclear industry were building LWRs in his home state of California (and they are better for nuclear weapons). Nixon didn't care about safety, he cared about jobs in California.
The big problem with solar and wind is they aren't on-demand, require long transmission lines, and since energy storage is impractical sometimes are idled. I can't tell you how many times I've driven past wind farms that had maybe 10 turbines running (oh hundreds), despite gusting winds. The MSRE and likely LFTR could be shut off and turned on in 60 seconds and also can be regulated by load, something conventional nuclear reactors can't.
Mining of Thorium would produce heavy rare earth elements because they are found together, but currently thrown away due to the useless Thorium. The US could completely remove their dependence of heavy rare earth elements where China has a stranglehold and has massive tarriffs on countries that try to buy them instead of doing their manufacturing with them in China. That means more jobs in the US in mining, refining, manufacturing, and export (since we will probably have more rare earths than we need). But wait, there's more! Thorium is an alpha emitter (very weak radiation) and safe to handle (though I wouldn't eat it...), burns nearly completely (99.5% fuel efficiency compared to current reactors.5%), they can't explode or melt down, are relatively proliferation proof (in fact, if you don't mind extra non-reactive plutonium, pretty much completely proof outside a poor dirty bomb), don't require a massive, costly containment vessel (in fact, they may be cheaper to build than a comparable coal plant), they burn raw fuel, so no expensive processing and reprocessing... I'm sure I've missed things - there are very few downsides, like Beryllium in the salt is toxic to humans and would need safe handling, but they are incredibly minor compared to the benefits.
This is no promising technology or pipe dream - we've built two of them already (ARE and MSRE), and ran the second extensively - we know they work - the only thing we haven't verified is scalability, and that is easily worked around (in the same way processors do it - run the small critical part in parallel) and LFTR designs fix some of the long term corrosion (which all reactors have to deal with). They burn all their fuel, they leave almost no waste, and even that doesn't last anywhere near as long as uranium waste (hundreds instead of tens of thousands of years), and most of that is useful - that plutonium isotope the US used for Curiosity? Bought from Russia because we don't have a reactor that can make it, but a LFTR would. All that Uranium waste we have lying around? It could be burned in a LFTR (though Thorium makes a better fuel).
In conclusion, LFTR would give us jobs, energy, reduce our dependence on China and its chokehold on rare earth elements, and is environmentally friendly (if you really want to whine about the small amount of waste, there is actually a net decrease in overall radioactivity - no other reactor can claim that). The US has invested ZERO dollars in it since the mid 1970s for one reason and one reason alone - the nuclear lobby tells them not to split funding into unproven technologies because they are scared to death of this technology. As someone else put it, LFTR is digital and LWR Kodak. Oh, and China is building one, probably based on documents provided by FLiBE scanned from the original Oak Ridge documents. If they succeed, and it sounds like they are dangerously close, they could patent the tech denying us a way to create them without buying reactors from China.
I think he's putting spin on this - he doesn't say 93-95% is pirated, he says 5-7% pay for free-to-play compared to BOXED SET, as in retail. He doesn't mention how much business is digital download, and TFA is reading into it to say he means the rest is pirated (but that is all due to the spin he wanted to put on it). It would not surprise me AT ALL if only 5-7% of game sales is retail these days (probably more on console than PC, however).
People are taught that any radiation is bad, and then they go out and get a suntan, bathing in alpha and beta radiation, and maybe get a radiation burn... er, sunburn, make food on their radioactive granite countertops, etc. Most radiation that people absorb is, in fact, radon gas that comes up naturally from the ground. If you want a huge argument against fracking for oil, that itself releases massive amounts of radon gas, which has a relatively short half life (two weeks or so for the more stable isotopes, I believe) and is dangerous to be around for long periods of time.
I was reading about that yesterday, as well as the fact that mining thorium would yield a supply of heavy rare earth elements that could make the US a major exporter of these, bypassing the massive Chinese tariffs on export put in place specifically to get companies to move their manufacturing to China.
It just baffles me why the US government doesn't put money into researching LFTR because honestly, it is just win-win-win-win, but then I remember the 600 billion in lobbying the nuclear industry does pretty much specifically to shut out competition. Proliferation concerns are a joke - thorium is a minor alpha emitter in its raw state, which would be the state it is used in for a LFTR, and really, the US doesn't have the capability to even enrich the waste into a bomb, much less a terrorist. Dirty bombs with this stuff is even more of a waste of time - potassium (the stuff you have to ingest to live) is more radioactive.
Er, it runs on pollution (nuclear waste). This particular design won't hit many of the regulations in the US because it is basically a complex light water reactor, but any reactor that varies from the standards hit a lot of NRC snags, many of these intentionally put in to protect the existing nuclear industry.
Traveling Wave Reactors have some good features - burn most of their fuel, only require a seed of enriched uranium, run for decades without reprocessing or refueling, and reduce proliferation concerns because they burn the plutonium they create. They also have some bad features - require expensive cooling towers, have a meltdown risk/aren't passively safe (requires pumps), can't be shut down easily or quickly to name a few. See Kirk Sorensen's of FLiBe's criticism
Because there are no true Democracies in existence today, and often that term is used loosely to describe countries with some democratic principles. Meanwhile, there are many "democratic" dictatorship where the dictator is elected by a group of small party officials and therefore they are technically a democratically elected republic (as many of the SSR states were in the soviet era).
We also divided their lands and occupied them for 10 years with some governments hostile to one another, so there was always a massive military build-up. One government (Soviets/USSR) refused to give their part up when the others did, keeping it as a satellite state for 35 more years.
The Russian government now is borrowing some of the past fascist ways - crush dissension, use military and police power on own people, rig "elections," etc. The only major difference is now they have a flat tax and free market giving the rich more money through less taxation and creating more and more poor as the bulk of taxation is on the middle class and poor.
The Treaty of Versailles was brutal to Germany, requiring what would be over 400 billion today, but then taking away the mineral rich and heavy industrial center of the Saarland (as the Nazis called it and it is today - was Saar-something before that) and giving it to France as well. They then blocked banks from loaning Germany money to rebuild and without money or loans, hyperinflation ensued as people sought to snap up every hard currency available with what they had left.
hmm... that depends on implementation - if the government decided to provide for the people, it would technically be a plutocratic communism, as plutocracy is a governing system and communism is an economic system. Personally, I predict the regime will be overthrown when it gets divided into a tiny elite rich and massive poor and the currency collapses. America will probably end up being feudalism for a while, where the surviving rich hire poor to provide food and stuff in exchange for protection and housing (after they buy the US military, of course, and have the firepower to destroy any rabble that comes near). This is pretty much the exact situation that created feudalism the first time - a bankrupt government that degenerated into anarchy and professional military horsemen offering their services to protect the rich because the government couldn't afford them.
You don't understand how the fed works - they are a Ponzi and all they need to do is print more money to create inflation. They could, in fact, just print 16 trillion and pay off the national debt and even have a little bit of surplus (well at the moment I'm typing this at least), but that would cause a massive decrease in the value of the dollar (increase in supply) and decrease in buying power of that dollar, thus creating inflation. As the fed is a private company owned by banks and wealthy individuals that have purchased this debt (or so I presume - as a private company, they don't need to disclose their owners or their business), it is not in their best interest to do this. Their job is to create wealth for their owners by paying interest on their debt.
By the way, if you don't see something inherently wrong with allowing a private company to print money with the government's snookered approval, you should.
hmm... China deregulates renminbi. Central bank moves to renminbi as its currency. US has to buy renminbi in order to pay its INTEREST on its debts, and printing money deflates the value of the dollar and causes massive inflation and possibly a currency collapse. The only good I see is most of the country's debt is to itself, thus giving citizens and companies that own the debt more money.
Still think China can't crash the US economy? Well they may not have to... in May, a secret meeting was held in Europe to create a new reserve currency as well, based on several countries' currencies (google it and you can find some details).
IMO, the dagger is already in our gut, we just don't know we're dead yet.
Interesting sig... not exactly sure how an economic system where the workers jointly own the business could possibly be slavery, in fact it seems the exact opposite... OH, you mean the idiots that try to apply socialist ideas to politics and get welfare states like Obama has been doing (100 million people/ ~1/3 of the population on welfare?! wtf). But that isn't socialism.
Incidentally, I have friends and a relative living in various parts of Germany and relatives in Paris and they absolutely love it and would never move back to America (most have lived there 10+ years), so I guess each to their own.
OPEC has been moving off the dollar, Russia is already off, China has been moving off the dollar, most of Europe has been moving off the dollar, investors are moving off the dollar... twice this year there have been meetings held to move the central bank to a different reserve currency... nothing to fear, right?
If you don't fear that and are American, you don't understand how the central bank works... if they switch to the renminbi (Chinese money - yuan), for instance the US will need to buy yuan to pay foreign debt. US currency will have a value based on the number of notes printed and printing more money will devalue the currency, so the US will have to print a lot more money to pay interest if they pay in money, and that will in turn deflate the dollar's buying power (causing massive inflation - probably double digit). If you don't see the freight train of a recession that will cause, you are blind. When it happened to the pound sterling it took England 10 years to dig themselves out. Why have gold and silver prices spiked so much in the US? Because commodities survive when currencies fail.
Ben Bernanke has said as much, though the fed's job is to delude the sheep into thinking all is well despite being at the precipice of a massive recession.
They could always use lasers from an orbital craft or someplace where there is rarely clouds. The problem is more needing line of sight, as I recall. Radio waves can be quite a bit more indirect and far less accurate.
A 50-kW laser wouldn't be stopped by clouds or smoke, but would probably hurt the rover just a tad. We can always use one of those when little Curiosity goes rogue and starts building missile plants on mars to nuke the earth.
Jr High/Middle School? That was when kids are most destructive from what I remember (myself included). In elementary school we had access to an unguarded computer lab and even the crappy machines were revered. In High School and College I couldn't touch a computer without a teacher of some kind being in the room, and nobody would think about doing something destructive on them (haxx0ring sure, but not tearing things apart).
ok, I'll bite. The fact is, there is no "clean" energy that can be built anywhere, and many have major flaws. Wind Turbines supposedly kill eagles and often requires long transmission lines that make them inefficient in the best of cases. Not viable everywhere. Solar is inefficient both in land and energy generated and also generally requires long transmission lines. Energy output varies by season in many areas. Hydroelectric Dams have a horrible safety record, especially during construction, mess up the earth's spin, and can affect wildlife that depend on rivers. Some of the better power generating models (ie pumped storage) depend on high elevation drops and some other power source (like Coal) to pump Tidal (wave) energy - many of the same construction dangers as Hydroelectric, only works for coastal cities Peat (mostly in Russia) - large CO2 producer, kills fish with runoff Biofuel - corn absolutely rapes soil nutrients, and other sources aren't much better. Most sources are subsidized because they aren't economical Geothermal - great if you live near steaming hot springs and are basically sitting on an inactive volcano, not so great if you aren't
did I miss anything?
There's nothing inherently wrong with nuclear fission, Fukishima was just using a dangerous reactor design without the failsafes built into later designs. I personally feel LWRs are dumb to build on an earthquake and tsunami prone island, but passively safe designs like the MSRE were never developed and only are being looked into again now by companies like FLiBe energy. This technology was successfully developed in the 1960s and then subsequently abandoned, and the official reason was to avoid fragmenting the industry (but we damn well know it was all about the money - the nuclear lobby existed to protect LWR patents and these were threatened by any other nuclear power technology).
Fusion will require a very expensive containment vessel, and it will be a long time before it becomes efficient in any way (when and if they manage to get more energy out than they put in).
The 1870 war... Franco-Prussian war with Bismarck vs Napoleon III, I assume. My (Hessian) great great grandfather fought in that war and after it left his wife and daughters in Germany and fled with his sons to America so they would never have to see the horrors he saw. He never saw his wife or daughters again as far as we can tell, but boxes of letters that my grandparents had kept still exist. Unfortunately for me, I don't have them and my aunt won't let me take them, even though I'm the only one that speaks and reads German (facepalm).
I don't think the Germany people should take the blame for WW1, as technically Austria-Hungary started it after blaming Serbia for assassinating Franz Ferdinand and Germany was honoring their alliance (though they didn't have to since Austria-Hungary was the aggressor - Italy backed out on those grounds, so yes, there is some at-fault, but it isn't directly Germany's fault). After being defeated, the Treaty of Versailles was a disaster, it assessed Germany a fee that would amount to about $450 billion in today's dollars (for a country that was basically bankrupt), took the most mineral rich land from Germany and gave it to France (the Saarland), gave chunks of the east to Poland and Russia... is it any wonder why Hitler repatriated the Saarland and attacked Poland first? Oh wait, Poland attacked Germany, lol (Poland's attack was staged).
As for WW2 genocide, how many people really knew about the death camps? Concentration camps were everywhere - America had concentration camps for Japanese and to a lesser extent Germans as well. Jews and gypsies had been loathed for generations in Germany because some had gotten rich off of usury, which was forbidden by the Catholic church (and even Martin Luther who founded the Lutherans was anti-Semitic, so it was pretty deep-ingrained). I'm sure there was lots of schadenfreude seeing them get shipped away that would turn to shock if they knew they were off to death camps. In a military like Hitlers, you probably took orders or you die as a traitor. I can't imagine being in such a situation, but I can see many people choosing their own hide over someone else's. That is why I don't blame guards at these camps unless they were malicious, but the party itself is absolutely to blame.
I agree - Libertarians feel many businesses are too big and should be broken up to create competition. The right wing would prefer all businesses be monopolies they own. Also... Libertarians want social freedom. The right wing seems to favor surveillance on its own people Libertarians think drugs should be decriminalized (and even some legalized). The right wing thinks they are winning the war on drugs (and blowing billions fighting a war they can't win the way they are fighting it - basic economics will tell you that removing the demand is how you win it, not reducing the supply). Libertarians want small government. The right wing says they want small government, but what they really want is a police state with more military spending* Libertarians think the government has WAY TOO MANY LAWS. Both parties write one new one a week, and nobody can keep up. Libertarians want to balance the budget, ditch the fed and go back to the gold standard (I disagree with them here, but I agree we should abolish the fed). Neither party has shown any fiscal responsibility. Libertarians are typically moderate, and don't base their views solely on religion because church and state are separate. The right relies on Christianity to guide their philosophies (For instance, Jews believe that a fetus doesn't have a soul until 6 days after birth, so abortion would not be murder for them, right? This is why we need to have a healthy medium for our legal system and if you believe it is wrong, preach it in church. Same for gay marriage and other issues).
I don't always see eye-to-eye with Libertarians (for instance, I think we should decriminalizing drugs, not legalization at a federal level - let states decide both legalization and criminalization and only enforce trafficking at a federal level), but I tend to agree with them more than Democrats or Republicans.
*and Democrats want a nanny state with massive underfunded social welfare
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That makes no sense - fascism is a political system and communism an economic system. Fascism is just racist Totalitarianism.
That won't happen - all the guy has to do is rape any virgin and by Sharia law she is his new wife. If she refuses, she gets stoned to death and he's free to rape some other virgin. Technically they are BOTH supposed to be stoned to death for adultery, but usually the man doesn't refuse and is therefore given a pass.
Anything based on ancient Hebrew law, and that includes the Old Testament has that in it. The New Testament basically says forget about those old rules, but if the ten commandments were really sent by God, then the Old Testament god can't be the New Testament god (changing the letter g to lower case intentionally - this implies polytheism). The 10 commandments says quite clearly that Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery, defined at the time as sex with a non-virgin (later in Kings there is some leeway given for widows).
Funny - I have the same setup. The main thing I hate about the Q6600 is it lacks hardware virtualization, and I've been tempted to upgrade for that reason alone, but since my laptop has it, I went from a pressing need to upgrade to a "it'd be nice."
I think this year is going to be vacation priority - will fix CPU early next year, then batten down the hatches for the coming economic depression and US currency collapse (yeah, I have no faith in either Romney or Obama to prevent this, hedging on commodities like every other sane person).
I'm still running a Q6600 on my main box with a nVidia 560 Ti GPU. For most GPU bound games (read, shooters) I have no issues with it at all. For RPGs like Skyrim it tended to get CPU bound, but not so bad that I felt I had to update it today, and it played the Guild Wars 2 beta much better than my laptop with an i7 2630 and nVidia 560M (better CPU, GPU is 50%+ slower than the Ti and quite a bit slower than the 560, despite the similar name).
And the latest fad of police using license plate scanners to Id where your vehicle has been, and often this is public record - anyone can track you this way. Who knows if they have facial recognition in place as well?
A few other things - make sure any distinguishing features are covered, such as tattoos, piercings, etc. Grow a beard if male, or remove the beard if you have one, and add cheap sunglasses and a baseball cap, but once out of the area, discard both and replace at least the sunglasses. If possible, change your hairstyle. Buses and trains are your friend, cars are not. Get what cash you can from an ATM and leave the area as quickly as possible. Don't use cards of any kind, not just credit cards - frequent shopper cards also can be used to track your location, for instance, in addition to your buying habits. Don't call anyone unless you buy a burner phone, and if you use that, use it in a crowded place and then throw it away and leave the area as quickly as possible. Get out of urban centers - too much surveillance - catching a bus out of town probably is a good option. Make sure you don't have a bug on your person - especially check shoes where a cavity could be drilled out and larger tracking bugs could be placed.
It doesn't matter that they are or are not scientists - they should know their science policy. If they don't know, they can either say they have no opinion or ask for a clarification and choose their policy. Very specific, targeted questions could be used to find out what they even know, like have you heard of LFTR, and what do you think? I don't know if either of them know anything about it, but that would answer my question. I'd also like to know if they are open to exploring it or not.
And yes, the worry from environmentalists is not that wind farm kill birds, which are a dime a dozen in many cases, but that it kills great birds like bald eagles, which are relatively rare.
ooh, ooh - pick me, I can answer this one!
LFTR actually makes an excellent desalination plant. In fact, Alvin Weinberg's dream was to make desalination plants using a much larger version of his MSRE (LFTR is a successor that solves corrosion issues by adding a blanket) he ran for four years. That was until Nixon shut him up by firing him because his buddies in the nuclear industry were building LWRs in his home state of California (and they are better for nuclear weapons). Nixon didn't care about safety, he cared about jobs in California.
The big problem with solar and wind is they aren't on-demand, require long transmission lines, and since energy storage is impractical sometimes are idled. I can't tell you how many times I've driven past wind farms that had maybe 10 turbines running (oh hundreds), despite gusting winds. The MSRE and likely LFTR could be shut off and turned on in 60 seconds and also can be regulated by load, something conventional nuclear reactors can't.
Mining of Thorium would produce heavy rare earth elements because they are found together, but currently thrown away due to the useless Thorium. The US could completely remove their dependence of heavy rare earth elements where China has a stranglehold and has massive tarriffs on countries that try to buy them instead of doing their manufacturing with them in China. That means more jobs in the US in mining, refining, manufacturing, and export (since we will probably have more rare earths than we need). But wait, there's more! Thorium is an alpha emitter (very weak radiation) and safe to handle (though I wouldn't eat it...), burns nearly completely (99.5% fuel efficiency compared to current reactors .5%), they can't explode or melt down, are relatively proliferation proof (in fact, if you don't mind extra non-reactive plutonium, pretty much completely proof outside a poor dirty bomb), don't require a massive, costly containment vessel (in fact, they may be cheaper to build than a comparable coal plant), they burn raw fuel, so no expensive processing and reprocessing... I'm sure I've missed things - there are very few downsides, like Beryllium in the salt is toxic to humans and would need safe handling, but they are incredibly minor compared to the benefits.
This is no promising technology or pipe dream - we've built two of them already (ARE and MSRE), and ran the second extensively - we know they work - the only thing we haven't verified is scalability, and that is easily worked around (in the same way processors do it - run the small critical part in parallel) and LFTR designs fix some of the long term corrosion (which all reactors have to deal with). They burn all their fuel, they leave almost no waste, and even that doesn't last anywhere near as long as uranium waste (hundreds instead of tens of thousands of years), and most of that is useful - that plutonium isotope the US used for Curiosity? Bought from Russia because we don't have a reactor that can make it, but a LFTR would. All that Uranium waste we have lying around? It could be burned in a LFTR (though Thorium makes a better fuel).
In conclusion, LFTR would give us jobs, energy, reduce our dependence on China and its chokehold on rare earth elements, and is environmentally friendly (if you really want to whine about the small amount of waste, there is actually a net decrease in overall radioactivity - no other reactor can claim that). The US has invested ZERO dollars in it since the mid 1970s for one reason and one reason alone - the nuclear lobby tells them not to split funding into unproven technologies because they are scared to death of this technology. As someone else put it, LFTR is digital and LWR Kodak. Oh, and China is building one, probably based on documents provided by FLiBE scanned from the original Oak Ridge documents. If they succeed, and it sounds like they are dangerously close, they could patent the tech denying us a way to create them without buying reactors from China.
I think he's putting spin on this - he doesn't say 93-95% is pirated, he says 5-7% pay for free-to-play compared to BOXED SET, as in retail. He doesn't mention how much business is digital download, and TFA is reading into it to say he means the rest is pirated (but that is all due to the spin he wanted to put on it). It would not surprise me AT ALL if only 5-7% of game sales is retail these days (probably more on console than PC, however).
People are taught that any radiation is bad, and then they go out and get a suntan, bathing in alpha and beta radiation, and maybe get a radiation burn... er, sunburn, make food on their radioactive granite countertops, etc. Most radiation that people absorb is, in fact, radon gas that comes up naturally from the ground. If you want a huge argument against fracking for oil, that itself releases massive amounts of radon gas, which has a relatively short half life (two weeks or so for the more stable isotopes, I believe) and is dangerous to be around for long periods of time.
I was reading about that yesterday, as well as the fact that mining thorium would yield a supply of heavy rare earth elements that could make the US a major exporter of these, bypassing the massive Chinese tariffs on export put in place specifically to get companies to move their manufacturing to China.
It just baffles me why the US government doesn't put money into researching LFTR because honestly, it is just win-win-win-win, but then I remember the 600 billion in lobbying the nuclear industry does pretty much specifically to shut out competition. Proliferation concerns are a joke - thorium is a minor alpha emitter in its raw state, which would be the state it is used in for a LFTR, and really, the US doesn't have the capability to even enrich the waste into a bomb, much less a terrorist. Dirty bombs with this stuff is even more of a waste of time - potassium (the stuff you have to ingest to live) is more radioactive.
Er, it runs on pollution (nuclear waste). This particular design won't hit many of the regulations in the US because it is basically a complex light water reactor, but any reactor that varies from the standards hit a lot of NRC snags, many of these intentionally put in to protect the existing nuclear industry.
Traveling Wave Reactors have some good features - burn most of their fuel, only require a seed of enriched uranium, run for decades without reprocessing or refueling, and reduce proliferation concerns because they burn the plutonium they create. They also have some bad features - require expensive cooling towers, have a meltdown risk/aren't passively safe (requires pumps), can't be shut down easily or quickly to name a few. See Kirk Sorensen's of FLiBe's criticism
Because there are no true Democracies in existence today, and often that term is used loosely to describe countries with some democratic principles. Meanwhile, there are many "democratic" dictatorship where the dictator is elected by a group of small party officials and therefore they are technically a democratically elected republic (as many of the SSR states were in the soviet era).
We also divided their lands and occupied them for 10 years with some governments hostile to one another, so there was always a massive military build-up. One government (Soviets/USSR) refused to give their part up when the others did, keeping it as a satellite state for 35 more years.
The Russian government now is borrowing some of the past fascist ways - crush dissension, use military and police power on own people, rig "elections," etc. The only major difference is now they have a flat tax and free market giving the rich more money through less taxation and creating more and more poor as the bulk of taxation is on the middle class and poor.
The Treaty of Versailles was brutal to Germany, requiring what would be over 400 billion today, but then taking away the mineral rich and heavy industrial center of the Saarland (as the Nazis called it and it is today - was Saar-something before that) and giving it to France as well. They then blocked banks from loaning Germany money to rebuild and without money or loans, hyperinflation ensued as people sought to snap up every hard currency available with what they had left.
hmm... that depends on implementation - if the government decided to provide for the people, it would technically be a plutocratic communism, as plutocracy is a governing system and communism is an economic system. Personally, I predict the regime will be overthrown when it gets divided into a tiny elite rich and massive poor and the currency collapses. America will probably end up being feudalism for a while, where the surviving rich hire poor to provide food and stuff in exchange for protection and housing (after they buy the US military, of course, and have the firepower to destroy any rabble that comes near). This is pretty much the exact situation that created feudalism the first time - a bankrupt government that degenerated into anarchy and professional military horsemen offering their services to protect the rich because the government couldn't afford them.
You don't understand how the fed works - they are a Ponzi and all they need to do is print more money to create inflation. They could, in fact, just print 16 trillion and pay off the national debt and even have a little bit of surplus (well at the moment I'm typing this at least), but that would cause a massive decrease in the value of the dollar (increase in supply) and decrease in buying power of that dollar, thus creating inflation. As the fed is a private company owned by banks and wealthy individuals that have purchased this debt (or so I presume - as a private company, they don't need to disclose their owners or their business), it is not in their best interest to do this. Their job is to create wealth for their owners by paying interest on their debt.
By the way, if you don't see something inherently wrong with allowing a private company to print money with the government's snookered approval, you should.
hmm... China deregulates renminbi. Central bank moves to renminbi as its currency. US has to buy renminbi in order to pay its INTEREST on its debts, and printing money deflates the value of the dollar and causes massive inflation and possibly a currency collapse. The only good I see is most of the country's debt is to itself, thus giving citizens and companies that own the debt more money.
Fairy tale? maybe you weren't paying attention...
Still think China can't crash the US economy? Well they may not have to... in May, a secret meeting was held in Europe to create a new reserve currency as well, based on several countries' currencies (google it and you can find some details).
IMO, the dagger is already in our gut, we just don't know we're dead yet.
Interesting sig... not exactly sure how an economic system where the workers jointly own the business could possibly be slavery, in fact it seems the exact opposite... OH, you mean the idiots that try to apply socialist ideas to politics and get welfare states like Obama has been doing (100 million people/ ~1/3 of the population on welfare?! wtf). But that isn't socialism.
Incidentally, I have friends and a relative living in various parts of Germany and relatives in Paris and they absolutely love it and would never move back to America (most have lived there 10+ years), so I guess each to their own.
I really hope that is in jest... really. hope.
OPEC has been moving off the dollar, Russia is already off, China has been moving off the dollar, most of Europe has been moving off the dollar, investors are moving off the dollar... twice this year there have been meetings held to move the central bank to a different reserve currency... nothing to fear, right?
If you don't fear that and are American, you don't understand how the central bank works... if they switch to the renminbi (Chinese money - yuan), for instance the US will need to buy yuan to pay foreign debt. US currency will have a value based on the number of notes printed and printing more money will devalue the currency, so the US will have to print a lot more money to pay interest if they pay in money, and that will in turn deflate the dollar's buying power (causing massive inflation - probably double digit). If you don't see the freight train of a recession that will cause, you are blind. When it happened to the pound sterling it took England 10 years to dig themselves out. Why have gold and silver prices spiked so much in the US? Because commodities survive when currencies fail.
Ben Bernanke has said as much, though the fed's job is to delude the sheep into thinking all is well despite being at the precipice of a massive recession.
They could always use lasers from an orbital craft or someplace where there is rarely clouds. The problem is more needing line of sight, as I recall. Radio waves can be quite a bit more indirect and far less accurate.
A 50-kW laser wouldn't be stopped by clouds or smoke, but would probably hurt the rover just a tad. We can always use one of those when little Curiosity goes rogue and starts building missile plants on mars to nuke the earth.
Jr High/Middle School? That was when kids are most destructive from what I remember (myself included). In elementary school we had access to an unguarded computer lab and even the crappy machines were revered. In High School and College I couldn't touch a computer without a teacher of some kind being in the room, and nobody would think about doing something destructive on them (haxx0ring sure, but not tearing things apart).
ok, I'll bite. The fact is, there is no "clean" energy that can be built anywhere, and many have major flaws.
Wind Turbines supposedly kill eagles and often requires long transmission lines that make them inefficient in the best of cases. Not viable everywhere.
Solar is inefficient both in land and energy generated and also generally requires long transmission lines. Energy output varies by season in many areas.
Hydroelectric Dams have a horrible safety record, especially during construction, mess up the earth's spin, and can affect wildlife that depend on rivers. Some of the better power generating models (ie pumped storage) depend on high elevation drops and some other power source (like Coal) to pump
Tidal (wave) energy - many of the same construction dangers as Hydroelectric, only works for coastal cities
Peat (mostly in Russia) - large CO2 producer, kills fish with runoff
Biofuel - corn absolutely rapes soil nutrients, and other sources aren't much better. Most sources are subsidized because they aren't economical
Geothermal - great if you live near steaming hot springs and are basically sitting on an inactive volcano, not so great if you aren't
did I miss anything?
There's nothing inherently wrong with nuclear fission, Fukishima was just using a dangerous reactor design without the failsafes built into later designs. I personally feel LWRs are dumb to build on an earthquake and tsunami prone island, but passively safe designs like the MSRE were never developed and only are being looked into again now by companies like FLiBe energy. This technology was successfully developed in the 1960s and then subsequently abandoned, and the official reason was to avoid fragmenting the industry (but we damn well know it was all about the money - the nuclear lobby existed to protect LWR patents and these were threatened by any other nuclear power technology).
Fusion will require a very expensive containment vessel, and it will be a long time before it becomes efficient in any way (when and if they manage to get more energy out than they put in).
The 1870 war... Franco-Prussian war with Bismarck vs Napoleon III, I assume. My (Hessian) great great grandfather fought in that war and after it left his wife and daughters in Germany and fled with his sons to America so they would never have to see the horrors he saw. He never saw his wife or daughters again as far as we can tell, but boxes of letters that my grandparents had kept still exist. Unfortunately for me, I don't have them and my aunt won't let me take them, even though I'm the only one that speaks and reads German (facepalm).
I don't think the Germany people should take the blame for WW1, as technically Austria-Hungary started it after blaming Serbia for assassinating Franz Ferdinand and Germany was honoring their alliance (though they didn't have to since Austria-Hungary was the aggressor - Italy backed out on those grounds, so yes, there is some at-fault, but it isn't directly Germany's fault). After being defeated, the Treaty of Versailles was a disaster, it assessed Germany a fee that would amount to about $450 billion in today's dollars (for a country that was basically bankrupt), took the most mineral rich land from Germany and gave it to France (the Saarland), gave chunks of the east to Poland and Russia... is it any wonder why Hitler repatriated the Saarland and attacked Poland first? Oh wait, Poland attacked Germany, lol (Poland's attack was staged).
As for WW2 genocide, how many people really knew about the death camps? Concentration camps were everywhere - America had concentration camps for Japanese and to a lesser extent Germans as well. Jews and gypsies had been loathed for generations in Germany because some had gotten rich off of usury, which was forbidden by the Catholic church (and even Martin Luther who founded the Lutherans was anti-Semitic, so it was pretty deep-ingrained). I'm sure there was lots of schadenfreude seeing them get shipped away that would turn to shock if they knew they were off to death camps. In a military like Hitlers, you probably took orders or you die as a traitor. I can't imagine being in such a situation, but I can see many people choosing their own hide over someone else's. That is why I don't blame guards at these camps unless they were malicious, but the party itself is absolutely to blame.
I agree - Libertarians feel many businesses are too big and should be broken up to create competition. The right wing would prefer all businesses be monopolies they own.
Also...
Libertarians want social freedom. The right wing seems to favor surveillance on its own people
Libertarians think drugs should be decriminalized (and even some legalized). The right wing thinks they are winning the war on drugs (and blowing billions fighting a war they can't win the way they are fighting it - basic economics will tell you that removing the demand is how you win it, not reducing the supply).
Libertarians want small government. The right wing says they want small government, but what they really want is a police state with more military spending*
Libertarians think the government has WAY TOO MANY LAWS. Both parties write one new one a week, and nobody can keep up.
Libertarians want to balance the budget, ditch the fed and go back to the gold standard (I disagree with them here, but I agree we should abolish the fed). Neither party has shown any fiscal responsibility.
Libertarians are typically moderate, and don't base their views solely on religion because church and state are separate. The right relies on Christianity to guide their philosophies (For instance, Jews believe that a fetus doesn't have a soul until 6 days after birth, so abortion would not be murder for them, right? This is why we need to have a healthy medium for our legal system and if you believe it is wrong, preach it in church. Same for gay marriage and other issues).
I don't always see eye-to-eye with Libertarians (for instance, I think we should decriminalizing drugs, not legalization at a federal level - let states decide both legalization and criminalization and only enforce trafficking at a federal level), but I tend to agree with them more than Democrats or Republicans.
*and Democrats want a nanny state with massive underfunded social welfare