There's a difference between "being prepared" and "Oh, shit, let's panic!" When this stuff comes up, the public reaction is usually the latter. These guys aspire to all sorts of stuff and if even half of it were realistic they would have taken over the world by now. The reality is that their resources and competence don't match their aspirations and our policy responses should take that into consideration. Some nutbar in a cave announcing his intention to get hold of a hydrogen bomb and blow us all to hell should cause us to spot check the security of the known hydrogen bomb storage sites. It shouldn't cause us to start digging billion dollar fallout shelters under every major city or grounding airplanes whenever somebody uses the word "hydrogen."

I'd be a little more inclined to believe that the person who wrote the document was a real expert if there had been a known case of these guys actually producing a biological weapon. This sounds a whole lot more like people who have never built a biological weapon teaching other people who have never built a biologial weapon how to build a biological weapon. Lots of thought experiments being put on paper as instructions as if they were tried and true methods.

I can do a write up for how to build a nuclear bomb for my terrorist brothers based on my rudimentary undergraduate physics education, but there's no way in hell those instructions would actually produce anything useful.

It would be interesting to see if drilling randomly in 3 other places on the property also generated water at around 70 feet. It could very well be that the property just sits on a lot of shallow water.

Containment and letting an economically fragile enemy overextend itself and collapse of its own accord? I'm down with that. Beats starting World War III.

That's the point. The best way to get people to figure out how many bad laws there are is to actually enforce them for a little while. Right now, those laws are around for poor unlucky bastards who the law decides to make an example of. They're not an issue for the rest of us. But they're there hanging over everybody. Enforcing the laws as written mercilessly enough that a few senators' kids end up getting picked up might encourage us to prune things back somewhat. A little less law, a little more order.

I've always liked the idea of officers having to personally carry liability insurance. Bump their pay enough to cover the average liability insurance. Cops that behave badly and start to look risky to insurance carriers pay a personal cost. Insurance carriers would almost certainly add a "no coverage if your camera is off" clause to the policy pretty quickly. At minimum, carrying a camera would probably massively reduce your premiums. Turn the camera off and beat somebody up if you want to, but nobody has your back if it goes court and you're personally liable for damages.

That depends on how the footage is handled. Maybe it's only kept for a while, and then deleted if it isn't requested in any case.

That's how I'd run it. Video is stored away securely and only the relevant timeframes are retrieved if something goes to court or someone otherwise decides to make an issue of it. No bullshit like demanding a week's worth of video footage or having supervisors do spot checks. If a citizen complains or if a criminal case is filed, the relevant video is pulled. Anything more requires a court order.

All of this worry about cops going to the bathroom or political fishing expeditions can be resolved with decent storage and access policies.

I think the logic is that if the variable we want to reduce is "number of birds killed" then there may be ways of reducing it more effectively that don't involve halting production of a really useful energy resource. There's *lots* of stuff humans do that kills birds. If birds are really the concern, our energy might be better spent elsewhere.

This sort of makes the statement, "You can't prove a negative," break down into, "You can't prove something that can't be proved." Well, now that's out of the way.

Jail isn't going to do any good unless you put the whole agency in jail.

I don't know. You take few people who thought that their rule breaking would only get "the agency" as a whole in trouble and put those people in jail and some of the ones left over might start to take the rules more seriously.

I let my IEEE membership lapse when I got tired of feeling like no matter how many sub-memberships I had, I almost never had access to the journal articles I wanted. "Oh, you're a member of the Signal Processing Society. You'd need to be a member of the Society of Signal Processing (Splitters!) to get that article." It was starting to feel like this.

The trick is to keep the poeple in charge afraid of what the mob might do while not actually having the mob take over and run things. It's a tough balance to strike.

OK, one more time. Can you state your position clearly? Because the best I can read is something like this:

Congress wanted to stimulate green technology growth so it approved a bunch of loans and had the DOE administer them. The DOE did so, losing money on some ventures (but far less than Congress allocated for expected losses on a program that wasn't supposed to be profitable) and ending up with something like 3% of their portfolio in failed ventures. Therefore, we should defund the science work that the DOE does.

There's a jump in there somewhere that I'm not fully following. I mean, I missed the part where the American way of life was destroyed, industries collapsed, and cats and dogs began to live together. But even if that was the case, why are we gutting the science funding again?

No, I'm saying you used a scientific organization as a puppet for a political program that hurt a lot of people and is in the process of destroying industries, communities, and ways of life.

How, specifically? Fundamentally, is the DOE doing bad research? Are the results wrong? Or is good research simply being used to support political ends that you disagree with?

If I ask an expert if X is true and then use his answer to support my position, does that make him a "puppet" that my enemies should attack?

The DoE should be focused on shit that works.

The thing about shit that works is that you don't really have to do any science or engineering to it. Because it already works.

Scientists and engineers focus on the shit that doesn't yet work for a reason.