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Comment Re:Good (Score 2, Insightful) 477

So basically "slow down over there, you're making the rest of us look bad" enshrined into law.

Next thing you know, they'll be passing a law so that companies must pay salary based on employees need rather then their productivity, because it's not fair that an engineer with a big family gets paid less than a single engineer just because he's not as good at the job.

I swear, it's as if these people read the first half of Atlas Shrugged and said "oh hey, that's a good idea, let's do that!"

Comment Re:There are many not worked up over it (Score 1) 535

Everything Facebook as bought up until now have been products relating to the use of Facebook and social media content. This is the first company that Facebook has bought that is hardware oriented and not a product which is integral to Facebook. Therefore it is hard to extrapolate their previous acquisitions to what they will do with Oculus. I look at the situation (optimistically) as sort of like Elon Musk, founder of Paypal, starting SpaceX. Hopefully Zuckerburg is interested in Oculus because he thinks it is a worthwhile technology to invest in, not because he wants to absorb it into Facebook.

Comment Re:Offtopic: Meltdowns that don't power generators (Score 1) 154

Can someone explain to me why a reactor can overheat and meltdown like in Japan ... but not have the energy to spin the turbines to power cooling?

How can it get so hot that it boils the water way even under ridiculous pressures ... but that heat can't be used to power turbines?

Am I to believe that reactors actually generate more power when shutdown than when powered up?

I just can't fathom why a plant can SCRAM and then overheat ... but be unable to cool itself. Someones design is WAY fucked up me thinks. Its generating too much steam ... USE IT ...

It can. The main problem with this type of operation is that the main generator and turbine are not designed for very low power operation, there is not enough steam pressure to drive them below a minimum threshold (~5-10% power). The Chernobyl accident occurred during an attempted test to see for how long the reactor could run its cooling pumps on decay heat after shutdown (the accident was not caused by this test directly, but due to the inappropriate actions by the operators leading up to the test).

The problem is mostly engineering and the way plants are designed. While there are steam-driven and axillary cooling systems, on older plants they can only provide decay heat cooling for a limited time, and generally require at least some power to operate valves and monitor levels. They were not designed to cope with an extended loss of all electrical power. Some newer plant types are designed to be passively safe, such as the ESBWR, which can remain safe with zero electrical power or operator actions due to its natural circulation design and enormous gravity-fed cooling pools.

Comment Re:Makers and takers (Score 1) 676

Your last part is right on. The fed is printing money like a firehose to fill the enormous whirlpool of money being poofed out of existence by bad debt, and debt being paid off. This is why we haven't seen much if any inflation even though we are printing dollars - the expansion of dollars by the Fed is being countered by the destruction of dollars by removal of debt. The government certainly loves this situation - the ability to spend unlimited money without having to worry about inflation. The true cost of the hidden tax of government deficit spending is hidden in the losses of the economy as a whole due to the recession.

Comment Re:Makers and takers (Score 1) 676

"... that some low level inflation is better than low level deflation."

Are you serious? The healthiest markets today are ALL deflationary markets. Look at smartphones, computers, consumer electronics. Any commodity that is either getting better for the same money, or cheaper to produce. That's deflation.

THIS is what your "low-level inflation" has done over the last 100 years.

Government and big investment bankers have been pushing for an inflationary economy because for several reasons (time value of money being just one of them), it is INFLATION that helps the rich. It directly benefits Government, bankers, and Wall Street. It hurts everybody else by, among other thing, insidiously leeching from production and savings.

Absolutely totally wrong. First of all, Inflation and deflation have zero to do with prices of individual products or market segments - they are global to all products, services, wages and prices simultaneously. You cannot point to one product getting cheaper and say "that's deflation".

Secondly, industry changes have nothing to do with money supply changes. Electronics getting cheaper due to technology improvements, competition, supply, and manufacturing having nothing to do with the money supply.

Thirdly, while steady inflation is not good, deflation is worse as it causes the market to stop investing in industry and growth and instead invest in hoarding cash. The rich can become richer regardless of whether the market is inflating or deflating if they use their money intelligently, this is always the case. But deflation causes slow and negative growth in the overall economy and reduction in standard of living, which is bad for everybody.

Comment Re:Fusion as is, is a money sink and a jobs progra (Score 1) 196

$100 million is nothing compared to the scope of the problem. The Manhattan project was around $25 billion over about 4 years. The Apollo program cost $170 billion over about 15 years. The reason why fusion hasn't worked yet is simply because it hasn't been funded to those levels yet.

Comment Re:Hello, Barack? This is kettle (Score 1) 196

The notions that solar power doesn't work and that solar power hurts utility company's profits are not mutually exclusive. It is called negative power prices. Due to laws requiring utilities to buy wind and solar power at any time, combined with the inability to store or transport natural gas supplies due to lack of pipelines, the cost of electricity often becomes negative where the power company pays customers to waste electricity because of unpredictable excess capacity. This hurts utility company earnings as well as being wasteful and counterproductive to the economy and environment.

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