I think the parent was arguing that it is so dense (at least apparently - all we know here is what we see on the media) that it might as well be. I just looked. The density of Houston is about 1350 per square mile, Japan is about 750 per square mile, more than 1/2 of an actual US city (albeit one with a lot of territory). So the parent isn't completely off base.
Source? According to Wikipedia Houston has a density of 3500 per square mile, almost three times the figure you assert. By the same source Japan has a population density of 860 per square mile, so a 4-1 ratio. This is lower than Taiwan, South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, India, Israel, and the (Associated Free State) of Puerto Rico, which - while well populated - are rarely referred to as being "cities".
Half the population of Japan lives in just 4 metropolitan areas, which are quite dense. So the average density outside of these four areas is only half that of the entire nation. One could argue that these 4 areas are Japan, but that is a different discussion.
"The testing part is missing; the repeatable testability by independent parties of an hypothesis."
Say what? All of the scientists/science teams studying this issue are independent parties testing the hypothesis - that's what science is and how it works. It is a process of continual repeatable testing of the hypothesis.
What is your concept of this "missing outside party"? A new "super science" that mysteriously needs to be created to address this one issue because, as you admit, it is politically inconvenient for Wyoming?
Private enterprise if fully capable of building new nuclear power units in the U.S. if they want, the licenses are available, and the U.S. government still underwrites the insurance for the industry (a significant subsidy since it is a favor that other industries do not get). This has been true continuously for all of the last 35 years.
The reason none have been built is that the capital cost is very high, and the long pay-off time makes the investment unattractive compared to coal and natural gas. Also modern American business is allergic to investing to make profits in the distant future when profits can be made sooner in other ways.
It is a straight-up business decision by (short term) profit maximizing capitalism not to build them.
Or possibly, do you mean that politics should create mandates requiring they be built?
Also now that they know is possible, they can probably find other areas where the same effect occurs. I think it's really unlikely that's the only place on earth the effect happened when it occurred naturally across several sites in the area.
Such rich ore in thick veins is very rare - the uranium content of the ore was the highest in the world, 20-60% uranium, the average ore concentration current mined is around 1%, and many mines operate with ores containing a few tenths of a percent. Some Canadian mines have ore grades up to 20%, so there is a possibility it another might be found there.
We do know that similar reactors have existed in the past. The isotopic concentration of U-235 in natural samples exhibits an unusual variation in concentration over a range of about 0.008% (say, 0.7199% to 0.7207%). Other mid to heavy elements with multiple natural nuclides don't do this. The explanation would seem to be ancient nuclear reactors that have eroded away have created regional U-235 variations.
The cute part is that she thinks she can get away with it. She's not screwing over your average American household, she's screwing over investors who have money and power.
Unfortunately you overestimate the power and influence that investors, even very large investors, actually have these days
Consider executive compensation packages. Those packages are often a significant portion of the company's profits, and can remain enormous even when there are no profits at all. This is money being taken out of the pocket of shareholders. In theory those shareholders should be able to control corporate behavior in those periodic meetings where they get to vote their shares, and should thus be able to reign in these enormous levels of compensations that greatly exceed world standards, and historical U.S. standards. But voting on executive pay has only recently be mandated by law (before such votes were rarely taken) and they are non-binding - i.e. the board can ignore them entirely. The result - executive compensation packages, which have been at record levels for a couple of decades, continue to explode, breaking records year after year.
You can't just to do the 'simple math' when looking at this issue. The UXOs are mostly concentrated in a small number of countries typically without the resources to solve the problem alone. Most of the global population does not live anywhere near the problem areas.
By some estimates around 75% of those mines are located in Laos and more than 50% of the yearly deaths occur there. Unlike the poorly worded subject there are about 10 unexploded mines PER PERSON there just waiting for a poor farmer or child to stumble upon....
I think you are including unexploded cluster bombs in this count - which while not being actually landmines do function in effect like them.
There is a treaty to do just that: The Ottawa Treaty. 161 States are parties to the treaty, unfortunately hold-outs include a majority of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the United States, Russia and China.
And of course a ban does nothing to remove those already in place.
Oops - editing era (accidental list deletion). That should read: "These could easily last more than a century, particularly in a dry climate like Somalia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Angola, Iran and Egypt (which happens to be the most heavily mined country)."
Given 5000 deaths per year and 110 million mines, we'd be better off ignoring them. Most of the mines would decay into uselessness long before they killed someone (at the current death rate, in a century, 99% of the mines will not have been stepped on, and that's ignoring the fact that the mines won't last a century.).
You sure about how long mines will (not) last?
A fair number are modern mines consisting of sealed plastic cases and modern military explosives that are stable and waterproof. These could easily last more than a century, particularly in a dry climate like Somalia (which happens to be the most heavily mined country). In fact it is not clear why these mines would ever stop working.
You are not considering the fact that the mines render huge areas essentially unusable due to the risk of getting killed or maimed. This is an enormous continuing cost burden on the affected nations This area denial effect is the reason the mines were put there in the first place!
The estimated cost of extracting uranium from granite is something like $700/kg-U. This would increase the price of nuclear energy something like 20% - not desirable but certainly not a show stopper.
But the key problem with extracting uranium from granite is the huge volume of granite that needs to be excavated - the "yellow coal" problem as it is known. The volume of rock that needs to be excavated and crushed is less than coal, but it does chew up huge amounts of granite formations just the same.
But at $300/kg-U seawater extraction becomes possible with present technology, and the world reserve extends to thousands of years of fuel, even if only U-235 is burned in existing designs.
A famous quotation by Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli upon reading a poorly written paper: "It is not even wrong".
And so it is with this summary and the TFA and with the original paper.
To start off with the academic paper discussed is arguing that concrete led to the downfall of the Roman RepublicNOT the Roman Empire. In other words she is claiming that it led to the rise of the Roman Empire. She argues that the availability of concrete to facilitate major engineering projects under Julius Caesar "weakened the entire political system" because it was such an awesome spectacle (apparently). As a theory of historical causality it is more than a bit daft. It seems a bit like claiming Albert Speer weakened the Weimar Republic.
Then bringing up the monocausal "lead poisoning brought down the Roman Empire" is the brain-child of the newspaper reporter who is sensationalizing, err, "covering", the academic paper. It has nothing at all to do with the concrete/Caesar/Republic thesis, but the reporter heard of this once and concludes that it was "widely believed by academics" and just threw it in for the hell of it (possibly it is the only thing she knows about Rome). This is hogwash. Any monocausal theory about the fall of Rome is going to be treated skeptically by modern historians, who have no shortage of good reasons for accounting for the end of the empire. The lead poisoning theory got a lot of press, but was never taken seriously by the community of historians, and it was debunked by other scientists pretty quickly (sure there was lead over-exposure about, but nothing like what the theory posits, and the Romans were well aware that lead could be bad for you).
No. The B612 people's math is demonstrably wrong, or at least very misleading.
...There are only a few hundred noteworthy craters on earth over the past few hundred-million-years. That works out to "not one per century".
Make no mistake -- I think we should prepare for and defend against them, and I'm in favor of the satellite and conversation on the topic. But the numbers in this study are difficult to swallow and I accuse the hopefully well-intentioned people behind B612 of some under-founded alarmism.
Did you actually read the article? The statement from B612 was "The foundation says the CTBTO data would suggest that Earth is hit by a multi-megaton asteroid - large enough to destroy a major city if it occurred over such an area - about every 100 years." Since there was a very famous one just over a century ago in Siberia (1908) that most definitely would have destroyed a major city if it had been hit it is not all obvious that there is any exaggeration here. And notice that it did NOT leave a crater. Computer modelling shows that this is the norm for megaton asteroid explosions, not the exception - most asteroids are rocky conglomerates that would dump their energy into massive atmospheric explosions and leave no craters, even as the fiery plasma jets from the sky lay waste to the surface of the Earth. The asteroids that form craters are megaton range iron asteroids (only ~1% of meteors are iron based on Antarctic data), or extremely large (hundreds of megaton yield) rocky ones.
... There is no technical reason that vodka should cost so much more than rubbing alcohol. This is all due to government regulation. Powdered alcohol will not be allowed to fit through the cracks.
This should be news to no one. The high sin/public health tax on alcohol (theories of the tax vary) is a key and very prominent feature of public alcohol policy. Most people feel it should be heavily taxed - public discussion of the issue is limited almost exclusively to whether it should be higher still. Powdered alcohol will be regulated no differently.
Geeze, even Mr. Franklin said "A republic - if you can keep it" when asked what the Constitutional Convention gave us. I'd take he oughta know a lot more then you! Additionally you didn't even bother to define or look up the definitions of the words you rather poorly attempt to define to mean what you want them to mean. A republic is defined as "a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch". You are correct as there is nothing in the word republic that implies representative - it's in the fucking definition you nimrod!
Saying that the US was "supposed to be" a democracy is nothing more than your wishful thinking. It was defined as a republic and that's what it is.....
Ah, that strange binary thinking the OP alluded to.
Let's try this, shall we?
From Dictionary.com: Democracy 1. government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. Republic 1. a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.
Do you notice that the "Republic" is a type of "Democracy"?
No? Okay lets lay the operative clauses out side by side: 1.... a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
1. a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them
Do you not see that the definition of "Republic" is merely a restatement of one the two forms provided as the primary definition of "democracy"?
Sheesh... this "we were never intended to be a Democracy" meme is so profoundly ignorant, and in defiance of plain English, as to be truly frightening.
...Pogo dancing was current at the time, and apparently the failure occurred when people on the bridges, synchronized by the live music, were jumping up and down in unison....
Nope. You are imagining this. You can see the actual videotape of the dancing as the dance party and the collapse as it happened here. Those codgers were not "pogo dancing".
I've heard news reporting before on this subject. The way it goes is this: the architect submits his designs, which are subject to review. Once the green light's given, construction begins. Now, engineers on the project notice a way that they can cut costs or construction time, or somebody requests a modification to the original design (perhaps to add a restroom or breakroom, perhaps to add or remove a wall or subdivide a floor differently)....
I wish I could find an appropriate citation...
The Kansas City Hyatt Regency Skywalk disaster, 17 July 17 1981, is an excellent case study. Before the collapse of the WTC South Tower it was the deadiest structural collapse in U.S. histories (dam failures are another story entirely). Until 9-11 the CitiCorp Center was well placed to beat it.
In the Hyatt Regency case the design of the double skywalk was changed during constructution, replacing a continuous steel rod that supported both skywalks with two rods, one from the roof to the upper skywalk, and one from the upper skywalk to the lower. Problem was the design had the continuous rod bearing the full load, the change made the upper skywalk bear the load of the lower skywalk (and the people on it) when it was only supposed to be holding up people on the upper skywalk and nothing else.
As built the skywalk was so overloaded that eventual collapse was possible even without any load. Naturally when it did fail it would be at a time when both the upper and lower skywalks were heavily loaded with people, and the floor crowded below. 114 died, 216 were injured - many seriously.
In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse.
Well, no. That figure only applies if a power outage (affecting both the city power and the building's emergency power, so as to disable the building's tuned mass damper) occurs simultaneously with every occurrence of high winds. Or if the building's owners decide to just turn off the tuned mass damper for giggles, and leave it turned off for a decade and a half.
...
True, but even restating is as "Every 16 years the building was in a state where if the power failed, it would collapse" is pretty serious especially since these events are always in the middle of severe storms.
You do realize that going on public (repeat PUBLIC) record is the very purpose of signing petitions, right? If you truly believe what you promote, then why back away when it proves unpopular? Why the insane "but really it just that I don't believe in the legal institution of marriage" deflection? No courage to your convictions?
(And it is now entirely legal to give billions to support causes secretly through front organizations. If you don't take advantage of this when advocating for causes that embarrass you to support, then you are an idiot, as well as a "well lubricated weather vane".)
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I think the parent was arguing that it is so dense (at least apparently - all we know here is what we see on the media) that it might as well be. I just looked. The density of Houston is about 1350 per square mile, Japan is about 750 per square mile, more than 1/2 of an actual US city (albeit one with a lot of territory). So the parent isn't completely off base.
Source? According to Wikipedia Houston has a density of 3500 per square mile, almost three times the figure you assert. By the same source Japan has a population density of 860 per square mile, so a 4-1 ratio. This is lower than Taiwan, South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, India, Israel, and the (Associated Free State) of Puerto Rico, which - while well populated - are rarely referred to as being "cities".
Half the population of Japan lives in just 4 metropolitan areas, which are quite dense. So the average density outside of these four areas is only half that of the entire nation. One could argue that these 4 areas are Japan, but that is a different discussion.
... We should be lucky we get cake every once in awhile...
Well, they tell us that there will be cake....
The article does mention one other problematic issue - it is this unsettled scientific question called "evolution". Seriously, read TFA.
"The testing part is missing; the repeatable testability by independent parties of an hypothesis."
Say what? All of the scientists/science teams studying this issue are independent parties testing the hypothesis - that's what science is and how it works. It is a process of continual repeatable testing of the hypothesis.
What is your concept of this "missing outside party"? A new "super science" that mysteriously needs to be created to address this one issue because, as you admit, it is politically inconvenient for Wyoming?
It isn't politics - it is economics.
Private enterprise if fully capable of building new nuclear power units in the U.S. if they want, the licenses are available, and the U.S. government still underwrites the insurance for the industry (a significant subsidy since it is a favor that other industries do not get). This has been true continuously for all of the last 35 years.
The reason none have been built is that the capital cost is very high, and the long pay-off time makes the investment unattractive compared to coal and natural gas. Also modern American business is allergic to investing to make profits in the distant future when profits can be made sooner in other ways.
It is a straight-up business decision by (short term) profit maximizing capitalism not to build them.
Or possibly, do you mean that politics should create mandates requiring they be built?
...
Also now that they know is possible, they can probably find other areas where the same effect occurs. I think it's really unlikely that's the only place on earth the effect happened when it occurred naturally across several sites in the area.
Such rich ore in thick veins is very rare - the uranium content of the ore was the highest in the world, 20-60% uranium, the average ore concentration current mined is around 1%, and many mines operate with ores containing a few tenths of a percent. Some Canadian mines have ore grades up to 20%, so there is a possibility it another might be found there.
We do know that similar reactors have existed in the past. The isotopic concentration of U-235 in natural samples exhibits an unusual variation in concentration over a range of about 0.008% (say, 0.7199% to 0.7207%). Other mid to heavy elements with multiple natural nuclides don't do this. The explanation would seem to be ancient nuclear reactors that have eroded away have created regional U-235 variations.
The cute part is that she thinks she can get away with it. She's not screwing over your average American household, she's screwing over investors who have money and power.
Unfortunately you overestimate the power and influence that investors, even very large investors, actually have these days
Consider executive compensation packages. Those packages are often a significant portion of the company's profits, and can remain enormous even when there are no profits at all. This is money being taken out of the pocket of shareholders. In theory those shareholders should be able to control corporate behavior in those periodic meetings where they get to vote their shares, and should thus be able to reign in these enormous levels of compensations that greatly exceed world standards, and historical U.S. standards. But voting on executive pay has only recently be mandated by law (before such votes were rarely taken) and they are non-binding - i.e. the board can ignore them entirely. The result - executive compensation packages, which have been at record levels for a couple of decades, continue to explode, breaking records year after year.
You can't just to do the 'simple math' when looking at this issue. The UXOs are mostly concentrated in a small number of countries typically without the resources to solve the problem alone. Most of the global population does not live anywhere near the problem areas.
By some estimates around 75% of those mines are located in Laos and more than 50% of the yearly deaths occur there. Unlike the poorly worded subject there are about 10 unexploded mines PER PERSON there just waiting for a poor farmer or child to stumble upon....
I think you are including unexploded cluster bombs in this count - which while not being actually landmines do function in effect like them.
... just maybe, we should stop *making* them.
There is a treaty to do just that: The Ottawa Treaty. 161 States are parties to the treaty, unfortunately hold-outs include a majority of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the United States, Russia and China.
And of course a ban does nothing to remove those already in place.
Oops - editing era (accidental list deletion). That should read: "These could easily last more than a century, particularly in a dry climate like Somalia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Angola, Iran and Egypt (which happens to be the most heavily mined country)."
Given 5000 deaths per year and 110 million mines, we'd be better off ignoring them. Most of the mines would decay into uselessness long before they killed someone (at the current death rate, in a century, 99% of the mines will not have been stepped on, and that's ignoring the fact that the mines won't last a century.).
You sure about how long mines will (not) last?
A fair number are modern mines consisting of sealed plastic cases and modern military explosives that are stable and waterproof. These could easily last more than a century, particularly in a dry climate like Somalia (which happens to be the most heavily mined country). In fact it is not clear why these mines would ever stop working.
You are not considering the fact that the mines render huge areas essentially unusable due to the risk of getting killed or maimed. This is an enormous continuing cost burden on the affected nations This area denial effect is the reason the mines were put there in the first place!
The estimated cost of extracting uranium from granite is something like $700/kg-U. This would increase the price of nuclear energy something like 20% - not desirable but certainly not a show stopper.
But the key problem with extracting uranium from granite is the huge volume of granite that needs to be excavated - the "yellow coal" problem as it is known. The volume of rock that needs to be excavated and crushed is less than coal, but it does chew up huge amounts of granite formations just the same.
But at $300/kg-U seawater extraction becomes possible with present technology, and the world reserve extends to thousands of years of fuel, even if only U-235 is burned in existing designs.
A famous quotation by Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli upon reading a poorly written paper: "It is not even wrong".
And so it is with this summary and the TFA and with the original paper.
To start off with the academic paper discussed is arguing that concrete led to the downfall of the Roman Republic NOT the Roman Empire. In other words she is claiming that it led to the rise of the Roman Empire. She argues that the availability of concrete to facilitate major engineering projects under Julius Caesar "weakened the entire political system" because it was such an awesome spectacle (apparently). As a theory of historical causality it is more than a bit daft. It seems a bit like claiming Albert Speer weakened the Weimar Republic.
Then bringing up the monocausal "lead poisoning brought down the Roman Empire" is the brain-child of the newspaper reporter who is sensationalizing, err, "covering", the academic paper. It has nothing at all to do with the concrete/Caesar/Republic thesis, but the reporter heard of this once and concludes that it was "widely believed by academics" and just threw it in for the hell of it (possibly it is the only thing she knows about Rome). This is hogwash. Any monocausal theory about the fall of Rome is going to be treated skeptically by modern historians, who have no shortage of good reasons for accounting for the end of the empire. The lead poisoning theory got a lot of press, but was never taken seriously by the community of historians, and it was debunked by other scientists pretty quickly (sure there was lead over-exposure about, but nothing like what the theory posits, and the Romans were well aware that lead could be bad for you).
They used data that is already public.
No. The B612 people's math is demonstrably wrong, or at least very misleading.
...There are only a few hundred noteworthy craters on earth over the past few hundred-million-years. That works out to "not one per century".
Make no mistake -- I think we should prepare for and defend against them, and I'm in favor of the satellite and conversation on the topic. But the numbers in this study are difficult to swallow and I accuse the hopefully well-intentioned people behind B612 of some under-founded alarmism.
Did you actually read the article? The statement from B612 was "The foundation says the CTBTO data would suggest that Earth is hit by a multi-megaton asteroid - large enough to destroy a major city if it occurred over such an area - about every 100 years." Since there was a very famous one just over a century ago in Siberia (1908) that most definitely would have destroyed a major city if it had been hit it is not all obvious that there is any exaggeration here. And notice that it did NOT leave a crater. Computer modelling shows that this is the norm for megaton asteroid explosions, not the exception - most asteroids are rocky conglomerates that would dump their energy into massive atmospheric explosions and leave no craters, even as the fiery plasma jets from the sky lay waste to the surface of the Earth. The asteroids that form craters are megaton range iron asteroids (only ~1% of meteors are iron based on Antarctic data), or extremely large (hundreds of megaton yield) rocky ones.
... There is no technical reason that vodka should cost so much more than rubbing alcohol. This is all due to government regulation. Powdered alcohol will not be allowed to fit through the cracks.
This should be news to no one. The high sin/public health tax on alcohol (theories of the tax vary) is a key and very prominent feature of public alcohol policy. Most people feel it should be heavily taxed - public discussion of the issue is limited almost exclusively to whether it should be higher still. Powdered alcohol will be regulated no differently.
Neither is the powdered alcohol solid alcohol. It is all the same.
I remember powdered alcohol being test marketed back then. Didn't know if it ever went big. This is 40 year old "food" technology.
You have a lot of good points there.
Geeze, even Mr. Franklin said "A republic - if you can keep it" when asked what the Constitutional Convention gave us. I'd take he oughta know a lot more then you! Additionally you didn't even bother to define or look up the definitions of the words you rather poorly attempt to define to mean what you want them to mean. A republic is defined as "a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch". You are correct as there is nothing in the word republic that implies representative - it's in the fucking definition you nimrod!
Saying that the US was "supposed to be" a democracy is nothing more than your wishful thinking. It was defined as a republic and that's what it is.....
Ah, that strange binary thinking the OP alluded to.
Let's try this, shall we?
From Dictionary.com:
Democracy
1. government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
Republic
1. a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.
Do you notice that the "Republic" is a type of "Democracy"?
No? Okay lets lay the operative clauses out side by side: ... a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
1.
1. a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them
Do you not see that the definition of "Republic" is merely a restatement of one the two forms provided as the primary definition of "democracy"?
Sheesh... this "we were never intended to be a Democracy" meme is so profoundly ignorant, and in defiance of plain English, as to be truly frightening.
...Pogo dancing was current at the time, and apparently the failure occurred when people on the bridges, synchronized by the live music, were jumping up and down in unison....
Nope. You are imagining this. You can see the actual videotape of the dancing as the dance party and the collapse as it happened here. Those codgers were not "pogo dancing".
I've heard news reporting before on this subject. The way it goes is this: the architect submits his designs, which are subject to review. Once the green light's given, construction begins. Now, engineers on the project notice a way that they can cut costs or construction time, or somebody requests a modification to the original design (perhaps to add a restroom or breakroom, perhaps to add or remove a wall or subdivide a floor differently). ...
I wish I could find an appropriate citation ...
The Kansas City Hyatt Regency Skywalk disaster, 17 July 17 1981, is an excellent case study. Before the collapse of the WTC South Tower it was the deadiest structural collapse in U.S. histories (dam failures are another story entirely). Until 9-11 the CitiCorp Center was well placed to beat it.
In the Hyatt Regency case the design of the double skywalk was changed during constructution, replacing a continuous steel rod that supported both skywalks with two rods, one from the roof to the upper skywalk, and one from the upper skywalk to the lower. Problem was the design had the continuous rod bearing the full load, the change made the upper skywalk bear the load of the lower skywalk (and the people on it) when it was only supposed to be holding up people on the upper skywalk and nothing else.
As built the skywalk was so overloaded that eventual collapse was possible even without any load. Naturally when it did fail it would be at a time when both the upper and lower skywalks were heavily loaded with people, and the floor crowded below. 114 died, 216 were injured - many seriously.
In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse.
Well, no. That figure only applies if a power outage (affecting both the city power and the building's emergency power, so as to disable the building's tuned mass damper) occurs simultaneously with every occurrence of high winds. Or if the building's owners decide to just turn off the tuned mass damper for giggles, and leave it turned off for a decade and a half.
...
True, but even restating is as "Every 16 years the building was in a state where if the power failed, it would collapse" is pretty serious especially since these events are always in the middle of severe storms.
You do realize that going on public (repeat PUBLIC) record is the very purpose of signing petitions, right? If you truly believe what you promote, then why back away when it proves unpopular? Why the insane "but really it just that I don't believe in the legal institution of marriage" deflection? No courage to your convictions?
(And it is now entirely legal to give billions to support causes secretly through front organizations. If you don't take advantage of this when advocating for causes that embarrass you to support, then you are an idiot, as well as a "well lubricated weather vane".)