There is no "hijack". "Western" is an accurate descriptor often used in anthropology for societies with specific set of values sourced from Western Europe. "Westernization" is the process of exporting these values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Other distinctly Western countries located in the East of globe are Australia and New Zealand for example.
You'll have to explain this one. What does "high level agreement among people" mean? Being one of these people, I would be interested in knowing what agreement I made that I don't even know of.
Also, your angle is inherently built on a house of cards of cultural supremacy of anglo culture of winner takes it all style conflict over cooperation and consensus. Yet this aspect of culture is rejected by most of the world in spite of massive efforts, both in soft and hard power to export it world wide.
P.S. I may not be a genius, but at least I'm not completely two-dimensional in my knowledge of things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Japan and South Korea. Although geographically Japan and South Korea are located in East Asia, they have democratic form of government, free market economic system, high standard of living and major contributions to Western science and technology, and could be described as "hybrid," modern and developed "semi-Western" states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Japan finished Westernization in 1950s and is considered a "hybrid Western state" that has significant Western cultural influences while retaining much of its native heritage.
What game theory has to say about that is to point out that these systems only work so long as the number of participants is small enough. Once the number of participants gets too large, it is impossible to effectively punish the leachers, and the entire system falls apart.
I guess we need to add to GP's original question the criteria of "works on a large scale"
Shachar
This is a lie often peddled in states with this system.
There are several concrete counter-examples that prove it false, ranging from Nordic countries (which view consensus and cooperation as primary tools of both political and economic systems) as well as much bigger Japan which has more of a top down system but where bosses initially even committed honourable suicide when they had to let workers go because it was considered such a significant loss of face.
These systems exist on large scale. What they require however, is a culture that promotes selflessness rather than selfishness. In the Western countries, such culture exists in Japan and Nordics. And to a lesser extent in Germany and Scotland. All of these are functional states (with exception of Scotland) where people routinely vote for and say in polls that they are willing to pay more taxes so that those who are not viable humans can live a decent life.
I believe the biggest problem was identified as the fact that for Areva, this was actually the first project they managed on their own. Before that, another french state energy company did the top level management and coordination and Areva was more of an executor than manager.
Areva lacked know-how in this area, and that is where the biggest problem with the project lied.
Actually the price of electricity in Finland is among the lowest in Europe. This is one of the chief reasons how our system works. You see, we have a lot of traditionally extremely energy-intensive industry related to forestry (i.e. paper, carton and cellulose production), metalworks (both smelting and advanced machining such as shipbuilding) and so on. As a result, one of the primary goals of the entire country's energy policy is to ensure that electricity would be as cheap as possible.
This kind of forward planning is what allows for those record profits. Not electricity prices, that are very cheap in Finland by European standards to the point that it was one of the chief reasons why most of the heavy industry stays in the country, and why modern energy intensive industries like heavy datacenters (i.e. Google) find Finland so interesting for their European operations.
Some other things you should understand before arguing on the topic of "eating profits".
1. Loviisa site is owned by a different power company, Fortum. Olkiluoto is owned by TVO. The third planned nuclear plant site is by a third company, Fennovoima at Pyhäjoki.
2. Financing in modern world is done through credit rather than through running profits.
3. Areva has actually agreed to fixed price delivery. Which is why Areva has done huge write downs for the plant. Most of the losses related to Olkiluoto 3 that TVO, the company that runs Olkiluoto site come from having no ability to produce power as planned and having to source energy elsewhere. Luckily we have solid interconnects with Russia (mainly Sosnovy Bor nuclear plant), Estonia (Narva's shale rock plant) and Sweden (Hydro across northern Sweden) to pick up the slack when needed.
4. Nuclear industry is considered so profitable here in Finland that third site by a separate company is in advanced planned stages. Fennovoima has selected a Rosatom reactor for a Pyhäjoki site just recently. To give you an understanding of how far decision making is on this, our government had anti-nuclear Green party as one of the smaller parties within it, and it ended up resigning from government when other parties, including much of opposition parties voted to proceed with the granting of necessary permits.
Olkiluoto #3 is, as the name implies, the THIRD unit. Other two are the most profitable endeavours ever, after two units at Loviisa.
I can't find you the source right away, however this was a part of investigative story made by YLE, our state broadcaster. They were doing an analysis of profitability of investments, I believe as a part of their story on which of our traditional industries are competitive and which are not, and then they hit the fact that there were four extreme outliers in their statistics which were extremely profitable. Loviisa unit 1, Loviisa unit 2, Olkiluoto unit 1 and Olkiluoto unit 2.
Olkiluoto unit 3 is the experimental new reactor Areva was selected to build, and they failed at it. It's fairly obvious to even a casual observer that I could not have been talking about Olkiluoto unit 3 because it's not operating yet - as a result it can post no revenue.
I know that you think you're being a smartass, but you should really look up what the terms used actually mean, rather than what you think they mean.
Then you won't like like a dumbass to others.
Same applies to any large plant. Spinning down and spinning up turbine unit alone can take a day.
But it's worth it because of just how economical these large units are due to economy of size.
Not only is nuclear power economical, it's currently by far the most profitable investment you can make in a lot of countries.
Here in Finland, the best private investment in terms of ROI are nuclear reactors at Loviisa, followed by nuclear reactors at Olkiluoto. Everything else is far behind those. This is because once you repay the debt on the plant, you have about 50-60 years of pure profit with minimal expenses in comparison to amount of energy you can sell. And those plants were built several decades ago, so they're basically printing money for the owners right now.
Of course we have a functional infrastructure, reliable grid and ability to sell power to all of our neighbours which helps profitability of nuclear power plants with ~99% load utilization significantly.
Likely pushing close to 100% load utilization. This one is apparently sitting at 97%, which is considered fairly low for a properly maintained nuclear plant which are usually around 99%.
They murder everything else on the numbers though, because that's what nuclear power plants do.
Those are pretty severe problems, likely related to the age of the plant and the lack of necessary maintenance. Strange that regulator cannot force plant overhaul to newer safety hardware.
The primary cause was the failure of backup generators that got flooded by the tsunami. Earthquake was actually not a problem - it didn't damage anything crucial even though it was a hundred times more powerful than what plant was built to withstand. Secondary cause was loss of all regional infrastructure, including loss off off-site power, loss of ability to easily access to plant to get replacement power from mobile generators and other similar problems related to logistical difficulty of trying to get cooling when entire region is devastated with over 30.000 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced due to the massive flood. They had the plans, but having no easy access to anything in the region due to the massive flood made those plans impossible to implement.
That is incorrect. Realplayer made a whole business model around compressing both audio and video enough to be vieweable as a stream over analogue modem connection.
The problem was that implementation was left to each individual site, which typically sucked donkey balls. You'd have tiny video window in the middle of a page choke full of flashing ads and other similar issues.
Considering that overwhelming majority either left for Chrome once it got the necessary add-ons that initially locked a lot of people into FF or FF forks that avoided breaking functionality and removing functionality like Pale Moon, I would point out that your FUD post is just that - FUD with no basis in reality.
FF's market share was on a steady climb before fiasco after fiasco started to hit its popularity, at which point it levelled out as people waited, and eventually went down to current figures.
If your argument was correct, we would have seen the curve go the other way - decline where we see growth (no new "features", old versioning model with less broken things every time new version is out, old UI, etc) and growth once those issues changed.
Essentially you're trying to argue that historic figures were all wrong and you know better. Which sounds a lot like current people working at Mozilla.
Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly.
