Uhg, this isn't knee jerk opposition to nuclear.

I'm not opposed to the continued use of nuclear power.

I'm in favor of moving to modern nuclear power facilities in place of the old ones. Yes, a 60 year old reactor can keep on chugging for another 20 years, but I'd much rather have a reactor designed with the safety of graphite or thorium running in their place for the next 80 years.

My opposition is not to nuclear power in general. My opposition is to saying that "we could have a Chernobyl every year..." without catastrophic repercussions.

-Rick

Of the resumes, numerous were of quality. Of the applicants, I still have 8 more on my interview list, but 2 appear to be of high quality so far.

If I am unable to fill the remaining positions from my current list, I have the other resumes from people who like to write novels to go through.

Similarly, for a slew of mainframe developers I received 60 some resumes, about the same for software PMs, high 40s for a handful of BI/ETL/DBA/Reporting positions.

Filling a couple of spots for a modern technology really isn't hard to find quality folks. Filling 9 mainframe spots is rough though.

-Rick

I don't care about killing >a fish. I care about killing off fisheries. I don't care about killing off some bacteria. I care about killing off significant swaths of bacteria that allow other more resilient strains to take over and negatively impact our agriculture industry.

This isn't me being some high and mighty tree hugger. This is me being concerned that there are dramatic indirect impacts on our environment that aren't included in a 'direct human casualties' metric.

Coal and oil are also highly concerning. This isn't a free pass for them either.

There are safer nuclear options, as mentioned in previous posts, thorium salt reactors seem like a huge step forward in the safety department. Even with traditional uranium reactors, as you point out, massive improvements have been designed over the last 50+ years. But we are still depending on reactors that were built in the 50's and 60's that had an original planned lifespan of 40 years, but keep getting extended.

-Rick

"Most of it's green. Like most northern areas if you take pictures at the right time you can get very dead looking terrain."

The problem isn't the green, the problem is the growing mass of dead tissue that is decomposing at an incredibly slow rate due to the lack of (or greatly reduced population of) bacteria, fungus, and molds that aid in the decomposing process.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

As stated previously, a single incident like Chernobyl can be isolated and mitigated. A 'Chernobyl event every year' on the other hand, can lead to a cascading effect where microbial life is so effected that the standard processes our ecologies depend on shift dramatically.

"I suggest you check your research. They've been testing/developing pebble bed reactors, but they've run into issues such that they're not replacements for rod type reactors yet."

Fair point, I was under the mistaken impression that France have taken a pair of pebble bed reactors live many years ago. That's what I get for trusting my recollection of a 30 year old news story ;)

"My point has always been not that nuclear is harmless, but that it's less harmful than the alternatives while still remaining affordable(minus political stuff)."

Nuclear without incident is less harmful. A single incident is still less harmful. But a sustained practice that leads to a significant incident each year can have a much larger impact by means of cascading ecological change.

And when you get back to the root issue, $/kW, we wind up in an interesting position. http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/a... has a nice breakdown of what we can look forward to. And the question then is, if Nuclear is no cheaper than wind/hydro, and comes with dramatically more risk, why aren't we investing in more wind/hydro solutions instead?

-Rick

"1. The total death impact from Chernobyl is roughly 4k people"

Again, I'm not comparing the immediate death tool. Taking that approach is penny wise, pound foolish. I'm pointing out that while a single limited nuclear catastrophe can occur with limited repercussions, a continuous series of such incidents creates a feedback loop where the secondary impact is far worse than the initial impact.

"2. The exclusion zone is 1k km, 1 a year would add up to 1M 'off limits', most of it indistinguishable from a natural park"

A "natural park"? Really? Have you seen what the controlled area looks like? I'll give you a hint, all of the dead wood, plant matter, animal life, etc... doesn't biodegrade. It just stays there, dead, dehydrated. No rot. no mold. Because the levels of radiation through out the area, while not immediately harmful to humans, is strong enough to kill off bacteria and fungi. There is nothing natural about Chernobyl.

"3. 1 Chernobyl/year is an absolute worst case scenario."

I whole heartedly disagree. A Chernobyl in Nebraska is a vastly worse case scenario.

"4. Estimates range from 4k to 93k deaths from the accident and resulting radiation"

Again, this is only >Human deaths. If you look at the full ecological impact that number is dramatically higher. As it is for coal and oil as well.

If you put your blinders on and look at only the direct and immediate impact on humans, yeah, nuclear looks really good. Take a step back an look at the nuclear impact on regional ecologies, and it doesn't look quite so rosy.

That said, I'm not opposed to nuclear power. I'm very interested in thorium-salt reactors. They offer much of the benefits of traditional nuclear reactors with a fraction of the risk. Even sticking with traditional uranium reactor, we need to dramatically improve our technology. These 60+ year old reactors have to be taken offline and replaced with modern technology. Hell, we're still using fuel rods in most of the US nuclear plants. Pebble beds have been in operation since the 1980's and we still haven't made the jump. Even better options are available today.

-Rick

" If it was really so dangerous, why do we have more deaths because of steam accidents than nuclear ones?"

That statement is only true if you apply it only to human deaths. If you include sea life, I'd expect oil and nuclear to blow steam out of the water (no pun intended).

"We'd save lives going nuclear even if we had a Chernobyl every year."

Penny smart, pound retarded. Sure, we'd have less human deaths as a direct impact, but after enough Chernobyls, we would start have serious issues with ecological balance. Crops, fisheries, radioactive contamination, the whole system would lead to massive collapse after a decade. Sure, hardly anyone would die from the immediate impact of the annual nuclear meltdown, but once we start ticking off the body count of the millions dying to radiation poisoning and starvation, we might want to reconsider that path.

-Rick

I am corrected. Thanks!

-Rick

I'm in the middle of a hiring surge for a major project right now.

I put out a request for 4 Java web developers with 8 years dev experience, hands on time with Struts/Spring/JQuery, bonus points for PeopleSoft/DB2.

I received 77 resumes. 34 of those did not meet the basic requirements (8 years experience, struts/spring/JQuery).

Of the remaining 33, 17 had resumes in excess of 6 pages and were set aside for a second pass if needed.

Of the remaining 16, 4 we ruled out due to concerns with communication or technical skills. If you are going to include a code sample, make damn sure it meets your requirements. And for god's sake, have someone do a grammatical review of your resume and run a spell checker!

Of the 12, 8 were selected for interviews.

Of the 8, I've interviewed 6 so far.
1 was a rock star.
1 looks like a rock star, but I want references first.
3 sounded like they were perfectly fine junior devs, but not at the level I need or expect from someone with 8 years of experience.
And 1 we interviewed over the phone, and I'm 99% sure they were googleing for answers to questions like: "What does 'thread safe' mean?" and "What are generics?"

So if there is a shortage in the tech field, I'm not seeing it in Java, C#, DBA, ETL, BI, or project managers. And this is in Madison, Wisconsin. Not some major metro area. Many of my candidates are immigrant contractors either naturalized or on visas. Probably a 1/4 of them are already local to south-central Wisconsin.

I am seeing shortages in two IT fields:
1) Mainframe developers
2) Recruiters who can tell a good candidate apart from their own asshole.

-Rick

I like your point, but the "Broken Window" theory is an false argument. The gist being that if you break a window, the glass maker must make a new pane of glass, the delivery man must carry the window, the carpenter must install the window, etc... and thus economic value is created by the breaking of the window.

It is false because the economy has not created new value, instead significant effort is being spent on existing value. The opportunity cost here is that the same effort could have been spent on creating new value and causing economic growth.

-Rick

I'm not sure about that.

As a rough estimate, a 3 credit hour course is ~45 total hours of class time over a 15 week semester. Or about 3 hours a week. Code Bootcamps (the USMC did their Comp Sci training in this way back in the 90's) are 40+ class hours per week. Or roughly the equivalent of 13+ simultaneous college courses. Over a 19 week boot camp, the student gets as much class time as 17 university classes.

To complete a university BS, you're looking at ~120 total credits. Figure almost half of those are non-major focused classes, you're only looking at 60 total CS credits. Which works out to be roughly 20 classes.

So the total class time difference between a 19 week boot camp and a full 4-year degree, in terms of comp-sci classwork only, is roughly 3 classes.

And I'm pretty sure we could knock off 3 university classes that are great for more theoretical knowledge, but of significantly less importance to entry level contractors. I mean, writing assembly and creating your own compiler are fun and educational projects. But in almost 20 years in LOB software development, I haven't ever encountered a situation where that knowledge has enhanced my ability to do my job or to create quality software.

-Rick

"So, cover the entire planet with corn for thousands of years and your single desired gene has a decent chance of appearing spontaneously."

Correct, if we were looking for a truly spontaneous event, you are absolutely correct. But we aren't. We're looking for a mutation as a result of a intentional change in environment, or as an existing trait that is intentional breed for.

If we are looking for a selectively bread Corn plant that is roundup resistant, averages 1.3+ ears per stalk, has a good flavor, has an acceptable growing period, and is disease/drought resistant for the regional climate, it's not like we're going to wait for the perfect kernel somewhere out in the 'corn world' to just by chance have all of those traits.

In fact, all of those traits except for the roundup resistance had already been developed through selective breeding long before scientists got involved.

If we take a field of non-GMO corn, and apply a light spraying of Roundup on it, much of the corn will die. But odds are some of the stalks will survive due to as you put it, "a relatively minor mutation to one or more existing genes which makes the plant more resistant". If we breed those surviving plants together, odds are that gene will propagate on, along with some minor mutations. And if we again spray the field with roundup, we will again kill off those without resistance. This is the exact same function whether we apply it to weeds or to corn.

Keep this up for a couple of generations and we have a roundup resistant corn plant without any scientists involved. From there, it's just a mater of selectively breeding back in a combination of taste/resilience/yield if any were lost over the previous selective breeding.

Spontaneously, yeah, incredibly unlikely to ever occur. Realistically though, a person could go out and do this in a small field over the next 20 years and have a product ready to ship.

-Rick

"given the extraordinarily low rate of mutations"

"low" is a relative term. In the case of corn, it's roughly 5.1 * 10^-5. Which sounds pretty low until you consider that each stalk will have 1-2 ears, and each ear has ~1000 kernels. And roughly 30,000 stalks per acre. Which means you're looking at dozens of mutations per acre. Yeah, processing that many kernels is going to be a royal PITA, but that's why we have undergrads ;) Even if you're just looking at grown plants, you're likely to see a mutation once every few acres.

"You are also ignoring the fact that in the time it takes for a new gene to be bred into a large portion of a species"

It is actually exactly the same either way. There isn't a massive assembly line of seed modification that alters 1 seed at a time. A select number of seeds are modified and breed in order to create the homozygous parents of the hybrid. As long as those seeds do not cross breed, you simply continue breeding that specified plant until you have sufficient quantities to sell (of both parents combined). It doesn't matter if the first seeds are from genetic manipulation or selective breeding.

"Contrast that with the ability to, say, insert bacterial genes into corn - something only possible through genetic modification"

I disagree with this assertion. It is possible through the sheer randomness of life for this same genetic change to occur. Again, I point to the existence of Roundup resistant weeds. They have by random mutation and environment changes developed similar genetic traits that closely match the intentional changes we made to the corn.

We could take the exact same approach to corn. Take non-Roundup ready corn, spray it with a small amount of Roundup, the more susceptible plants will die, the less susceptible plants will propagate. Next cycle, repeat the process, upping the dosage slightly. You will over a matter of a few generations wind up with a corn plant that is Roundup resistant. The problem though, is that you have no idea what other genetic traits have been propagated. Your corn may now have a longer growing period, may taste bad, may not be as disease resistant, etc... so you will need to take your new "non-GMO" Roundup resistant corn, and breed it back into plants that have your other desired traits. So after another pile of generations you'll wind up with a plant that is Roundup resistant, tastes good, grows well in your climate, and is resistant to drought/disease/etc...

Or instead of making it your life's goal of breeding corn, we can use technology to see what is the genetic difference between various Roundup resistant corn plants and non-resistant plants that have other traits we want. And in a period of just a few years you can have that same plant that would otherwise take a good bit of your life to breed.

At the end of the day, they are the exact same plant (genetically speaking). The only difference is whether you used science from the 1800's vs the 2000's.

There are risks to GMOs, specifically the homogenization of crops. For example, what we call a Banana today is not what our parents called a Banana decades ago. The banana propagates as a clone, exact genetic copies of itself. So if a disease or climate change occurs that effects 1 plant, it effect ALL plants. This is a risk with GMO as we wind up with far less genetic diversity by planting only the highest yielding seed lines. A single blight could wipe out masses of corn fields. But GMO doesn't cause such weaknesses, poor planning does. It takes all kinds, be it GMO, selective breeding, heirlooms, etc... bio diversity is a good thing.

-Rick

I would argue that a more technically accurate term is unnecessary because they would both describe the exact same thing: the breeding and cultivation of a mutated of spring of an existing crop.

Mutations are constantly occurring, even when the organism has evolved to the point where it is no longer in need of additional mutations to continue its existence.

The difference between us manually manipulating a gene and naturally selecting a set of plants with the desired mutations boils down to a level of effort.

For example, we can manipulate the corn genome to make it more likely to produce two ears of corn per plant than 1. Or, we can go through millions of plants until we find a handful that all have that exact same mutation, and breed them together.

The end result is the same, we have a new strain of corn with a specific deviation from it's ancestors that propagates a trait that we find desirable. Whether we hire a handful of scientists to make that change, or hundreds of thousands of undergrads to find the mutation, at the end of the day it's the exact same outcome.

This is also why we now have Roundup-resistant weeds. Plants continue to mutate, and just like the corn that we have modified to be resistant to Roundup, after billions of weeds have been sprayed by roundup, the only ones to survive are those that have a Roundup resistant mutation. Get a couple of those close enough together and next thing you know, you have a new weed that Roundup won't kill. And no one put crab grass under the microscope to make it happen.

We've been doing "selective cross breeding" of completely unrelated organisms for generations. The technical term for it is "hybrid", or when specifically talking about plants "Heterosis". This is why the corn seeds you eat are not the same corn seeds you plan. If you were to plant the hybrid seeds, you would not get the same plant. Similarly, my apple trees cross pollinate between themselves, even between species, resulting in Hawaiian-Honey Crisp hybrids. If I were to plant one of those apple seeds, I would not get a Hawaiian nor a Honey Crisp, I would get some random jumble of combination of genetic traits from both lines. The resulting tree could produce no fruit, or fruit that can't hold up to the local climate, or require more resources, etc...

The more you learn about crop science, biology, and genetics, the less scary the existence of GMO becomes. Now, the business processes, homogenosis, and idiots who don't understand how to efficiently run a farm with minimizing fertilization and herbicide usage are all serious issues that need to be worked on. The general fear of the GMO boogie man though, is just wasted heat from the FUD machine.

-Rick

"No, the vast majority has two: cable (DOCSIS) and telco (DSL)."

Around my place I get to basically chose between Jack and Shit.

Cable, for which there is exactly 1 player in the regional market, ends it service about 1/4 mile down the road. We are ineligible for cable.

We have DSL, for which there is exactly 1 player in the regional market. The best speed they can offer us maxes out at 1.2 Mbps, even though we pay for "up to 6 Mbps".

We can get WiMax from one of two local competitors, it is roughly the same price as our "6 Mbps" DSL service, but maxes out at ~750 Kbps.

We can get Satellite, for about 5 times the price, and to get a 12 Mbps down pipe, but the lag makes it unusable for gaming.

-Rick

They were using GMO crops, the big difference is that they we doing GMO through selective breeding, hybrid seeds, and a whole lot of guess and hope. Instead of what we think of today where we have the gnome of corn mapped and we can work with specific elements of it to intentionally cause the mutations we want to propagate. 100 years ago people worked to do the same thing, finding mutations that resulted in beneficial traits, then finding ways to breed it consistently.

The existence of hybrid seeds far predates any modern concept of genetic manipulation.

Don't get me wrong, Monsanto has some evil as fuck business processes, but they products they create are exceptionally good at increasing yield and farm stability. Same for most of the big ag players.

-Rick