Another one of those insights that you can reach by sitting in a corner and thinking: if a company, which has the monetary incentive to, does not have the perfect information as to which is the best safety protocol, a government who knows absolutely NOTHING about the production of pesticide does not.

The main problem I see with your argument is that it is a religious, not a rational one. You don't see government as a collection of people who direct an apparatus of coercion and compulsion; you see a God cometh down to Earth, doted with perfect knowledge on how to make every human endeavour safe from hurting third parties: from rocket launching to pesticide production.

If you just think of the wide array of human activities and apply your 'like enforcing stricter safety protocols on *insert company name here*' you will hopefully see the utter absurdity of your way of thinking.

Yes hun. And I am disputing that. Even with a lot of state run enterprises, so long as there is a stock market and private property in the means of production we have a market economy guided by the profit motive, otherwise we have a planned socialistic economy. There is no 'third way'. You say 'its not just the one or the other' but you fail to actually demonstrate it. Its not much to ask you to give substance to your fantastic claims.

You have not actually answered ANY of my contentions, just evaded everything. You're not really equipped for this kind of discussion. Read up on Marx and his critics before you accuse others of being 'nutters as the marxists'.

That is not politics, but business. He had a window of opportunity and missed it. What the hell does Microsoft have to do with it anyway? It wasn't even in the OS business at the time. They already had their deal with IBM.

Actually, yes, I can. Lets try a thought experiment: the people in North Korea get all their goods from the government. Suppose that government decides to stop feeding their population tomorrow, and they begin to starve, predictably since all the other restrictions that come with a planned communist economy are still in place.

Would you call THAT the new 'biggest Laissez faire experiment in the world'?

What would India 'impeeded UC' from doing? Leaking the poisonous gas? I think you are confusing a government staffed with flawed, ordinary men with some kind of a god. The USSR was no laissez faire and nobody 'impeeded' Chernobyl from melting down.

It sucks, but accidents do happen.

Well, we have a cutting edge social scientist here then! Which is this new form of social production that is neither guided by the profit motive or central planning? Please do tell.

Well, if he was phased out due to politics then indeed we are talking about state coercion picking winners and losers instead of the competitive outcome of a market. What, did Gates or IBM buy a Congressman or something? I'm not intimately familiar with the story.

And I'm not saying Bill Gates is a superman or anything, just that Microsoft under his direction has suceeded in giving the consumers what they want for a long time and for that they made him filthy rich. And he is unique in the respect that his company really didn't spend any dime on lobbying for special privileges or anything until the DoJ started to eye his company with greedy, greedy eyes.

While he is far from the mythical Randroid ubermensch, for he is a _real person_, there are much much worse cases of crony businessmen that conspired with the state for private gain at the expense of everyone else.

I really don't know what you mean by 'a complete capitalistic economy'. By 'market equilibrium' I assume you mean the mental construct of the state of equilibrium, where supply meets demand, or in Mises' work the 'evenly rotating economy'. It is just a thinking aid that has no counterpart in the real world.

About the potato famine in Ireland, I really think you should read up more on the subject, the historical context, the English domination, the laws that were in effect at the time that protected local English farmers from competition, o on and so forth. On the other hand, just by sitting with coffee and a cigarette you can reach an interesting insight: crop failures do not cause famine in the same way that I don't starve to death because I ( or an entire country even ) don't grow my own food.

Finally, what is social democracy? Or social liberalism? These aren't alternatives to a form of social organization like 'private property, prices and markets' as opposed to 'common ownership of property and a planned economy'. This 'social democracy' is simply this little forum where these ideas clash. Eventually you will end up with either laissez-faire or full blown socialism, that just happens in small baby steps instead of the Marx's revolutionary 'socialism by one fell swoop'.

He's a humble chap. Thing is, Killdal was a great technician, but was a poor entrepreneur.

Technicians are skilled at producing things in their areas of expertise. Entrepreneurs are skilled at guessing the future right.

Killdal guessed wrong. Bill Gates guessed right.

Ya, India circa 1980. The libertarian Eldorado of sacred property rights and individual liberties.

My argument lies shattered. Niggaplease... :-)

I love solar for that. If panels cost low enough, I'll be the first person to install panels on my roof an live in bliss.

I don't want to see solar banned, I just want to see the chokes on nuclear development lifted. Just require plants to be insured for catastrophic failure to internalize the risks and let the competition between manufacturers produce better and safer designs.

Thats a very good point. Problem is, I AM a zealot. I think it takes a bit of aging to calm down and realize that u have a better chance at convincing people if you don't act like one.

So you mean that, if Bill Gates were a janitor we would still have Microsoft Windows today. He's simply another cog in the wheel, historically irrelevant, whose role would simply be played by another replaceable individual in that scenario?

That is textbook collectivist ideology. I don't believe it, I'm afraid. Some people are more industrious than others. Maybe some OTHER rather workaholic fella would do a similar venture, but I wouldn't take that chance. Like all resources, inventiveness is scarce. Most people just go through the motions, get a 9 to 5 job, get old and die.

You can't know that. Sorry, but even without factoring the cost of the externality of pollution, a nuclear plant is much more cost effective than burning tons of coal a minute. Now, if you remove the regulatory costs from the State? Wow. Then its just a landslide. But again, I can't see the future just as much as you can. But think about it.

Oh, and statism does? Are not government officials individuals, who pursue their own ends like all of us?

Commons can't be protected unless they're privately owned. And that is true regardless of individualism or collectivism. Pollution is/was worse in China and the Soviet Union than it is in even radically individualist nations by comparison.

Of course they do. Who do you think invented, produced and sold you the creature comforts you enjoy every day?

Whether you're typing this on a Linux or Windows machine, it was brought to you by a superhero of the real world, be it Torvalds or Gates. Just to name ONE example.

If this were an Ayn Rand novel, there WOULD be a breakthrough energy source, but they would be forbidden, regulated and stifled to the point that everyone has to make do with older and more polluting sources, coincidentally owned by older, more entrenched special interests.

Sound familiar?

1. 1,4Kw/m2 is LAUGHABLE. And that's a given, unless we get Earth's orbit closer to the sun.

2. Nuclear failures are not catastrophic, unless you live in the Soviet Union or get hit by a 9 degree earthquake. Thankfully, the US isn't Japan and is lucky to have many areas in which plants will be built by a communistic State and/or isn't located over any dangerous faults.

3. Nuclear plants have simple designs as compared to this particular solar project, since, you said it yourself pilots systems cost a lot of money due to R&D costs, i.e., there isn't a design yet. You can't really have it both ways in your argument, can you?

4. Er, nuclear plants need refueling every couple of decades. In the case of the cutting edge of breeder reactors, they don't need refueling at all, they just burn their waste.

5. The talk about 'not needing skilled labor to operate' is completely spurious. It doesn't matter if nuclear needs 20 nuclear physicists on site if it produces enough energy at a low enough cost to pay for their salaries and still turn a profit. The world isn't run from 'a purely engineering standpoint', but from monetary calculations of profit and loss.

Nuclear energy has ONE drawback: very expensive failsafes. The thing is, it is still orders of magnitude more cost-effective than solar even after that.

There is one reason the government is spending this shitload of money on this project, which, coincidentally is the same reason government spends money on everything: politics and favoring special interests at the expense of the rest of the citizens.

Almost a billion for a 110MW plant, that won't provide power if there's cloud cover.

You get an almost gigawatt state of the art, passive safe with all bells and whistles nuclear reactor for that money.

And almost EVERYONE HERE, applauding like a bunch of Stockholm-afflicted fools. Ayn Rand's exasperatingly long novel was never as current, I gotta say.

But an unelected US government bureaucracy doesn't have jurisdiction outside the planet. Sorry.

That would all be well and good if I was trying to make my point as a skeptic one. But I am actually indulging in the quite diametrically opposed position of my bias towards politicians.

It is my personal belief that politicians are naturally selected as the biggest liars, so, to make it to president, you gotta be a professional whopper delivery guy. :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection