Not only that, Chernobyl has also helped to bancrupt the USSR. The cleanup cost enormous, more than a yearly military budget.
Citation please.
This seems an absurd assertion. The Chernobyl clean-up employed about 250,000 people for two years, mostly with low tech equipment, while the Soviet military had about 5 million men under arms, a lot of it very costly high tech gear.
I'm curious how a command economy with what amounts to a captive labor force runs out money.
I don't dispute that the Soviet economy as a whole was ineffective, but lack of money for defense spending seems kind of hard to comprehend.
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Your instincts about the defense spending in the USSR are dead-on. They never ran out of money for defense. They ran short on supplies for everything else, and the civilian economy suffered terribly for it, but defense was always flush with resources.
The USSR had, by the end of the 1960s, a fully militarized economy - the military was first in line for everything, taking so much that by the mid-1970s it stalled economic growth (this before Reagan, or even Carter, was in office). The notion that the Reagan military build-up caused the USSR to fall is not supported by studies of what actually happened, such as Ellman and Kontorvich's "The Disintegration of the Soviet Economic System".
The Guardian? The British version of Pravda? Too bad the Guardian's editorial staff can't share a shallow mass grave with some of the many victims of the Soviet Union.
The Guardian is on the extremely moderate UK left: at the last general election it came out in favour of voting for the LibDems (who are now in coalition with the Tories, and have reneged on essentially all their manifesto pledges).
To consider it as extreme left wing, you would need to be some sort of neo Nazi...
No, you simply need to be a mainstream U.S Republican today. Conservative policies of the recent past are now denounced as "Marxist" without dissent in current day Republican-land.
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That more reflects his background - street level activist and local politics, where that's how things are done. That's not really appropriate at the national level, where he had very little experience before becoming President. The result is that he views Congress as damage to be routed around (not that he's entirely wrong about that, and I say that as a conservative who's greatly dismayed at the sway the nutjob fringe holds on the Right) and tries to handle that in much the same manner he did back then... which doesn't really work as personal influence and the Party Machine hold much less sway at the national level.
As you say, the nutjob fringe does hold sway over the Right. On an objective basis, there has not been a Congress this obstructionist for more than eight decades. Although the Republicans seem fine with grid-locking government, regardless of the cost the nation, as long as Obama sits in office -- he understandably knows someone needs to actually govern.
Conservative political psycho-babble fantasies about what 'community activists' think need to be set aside. The fact is he is President and needs to deal with issues facing the nation, even if Congressional Republicans do not.
If Obama is actually, in any way, violating the principles of governance in the U.S. you can be sure that a lawsuit would be in the courts, passed up the chain to the Supreme Court, where the right-wing majority there would slap him down.
"Your O.S. Trip" - RedGum/Michael Atkinson (1981)
Yes, lets base public policy decisions on essays written by cheap sci-fi authors.
You mean based on essays written by a Professor of Biochemistry, and leading popular science educator, who also wrote some fiction?
(The "cheap" shot was way to obvious shilling. Your paymasters should dock you for something so amateur.)
Well, given that Obama is a centre-rightist I can't see that you have demonstrated any problem with the premise at all.
The problem with the premise is that it's based on the tried-and-true No True Scotsman logical fallacy, as in "no true leftie would bomb brown people." Obama may indeed be a center-rightist, but only someone preoccupied with ideological purity would reach that conclusion merely by observing his predilection for bombing brown people.
There is plenty of other evidence supporting this conclusion - it is hardly just his "bombing" policies
The way Obama spearheaded the national implementation of Heritage/Romneycare. His Conservative, but deeply misguided policy of austerity - shrinking the Federal government during a lingering depression for another. And these are the most important two policies of his entire 8-year term in office. That defines the character of his Presidency.
... inadequate to complete the identification of 90 percent of hazardous near-Earth objects 140 meters or greater by 2020 as mandated by the law.
This is the problem with Congress. How the hell do you make a law saying you need to identify 90% of something we can't validate at all? Who's going to say when you reach 90%?...
There is a field of mathematics that has this problem firmly under control. It is called "statistics". Constructing a procedure for making this determination would be a reasonable homework assignment in a statistics class, it is no more difficult than that.
Eratosthenes pre-dated Columbus by some time...he was not wildly wrong about the circumference of the Earth, but the size of the Atlantic Ocean.
Columbus was wrong about both. Despite having the correct size of the Earth computed very closely by Eratosthenes (we do not know how closely though since the exact size of this "stadia" is unknown), Columbus still accepted a grossly incorrect figure due to his own (flawed) interpretations of ancient geographers.
This much older modern human has the same fraction of Neanderthal DNA as modern humans today.
Think about it.
We haven't seen any ancient Modern Humans that have a different degree of Neanderthal ancestry.
When Modern Humans first bred with Neanderthals the offspring were 50/50. If these F1s bred with each other predominantly from then on you would end up with a new breeding population that was roughly 50/50 in heritage. If the F1s predominantly bred with Modern Humans, then the Neanderthan portion would be cut to 25% in the F2, and if the process repeats it is 12.5% in the F3, etc.
This process stops when there are effectively no more pure blood Modern Humans, that the Neanderthal genome has diffused evenly across the entire population. But subsequent re-encounters would inject new Neanderthal DNA and restart the process.
We haven't yet seen any evidence of this history yet. Even 45,000 years ago it was "ancient history" and epoch that passed many, many generations earlier.
Neanderthals are the same. The whole notion of "Neanderthals" being a separate thing is just a miscategorization of traits that modern humans have. Maybe they are rare, and have become less attractive over the millenia, but not any different than any other trait.
Look at Russian boxer Nikolai Valuev
The traits we collectively call "Neanderthal" are a distinction without a difference.
If you were complaining about the "Cro Magnon" concept you would be on solid ground. That turned out to be an imaginary construct. Neanderthals and Denisovans though definitely form a genetically defined group much more divergent from modern human populations than are found between the most divergent populations among modern humans (defined roughly by the San on one hand and everyone who is not African on the other). That said there is only 0.3% variation across the entire Neanderthal-Denisovan-Modern Human super-group. The Neanderthals and Denisovans were real separate breeding populations for hundreds of thousands of years, but still clearly part of one human species.
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Just addressing the example given - the "Cro-Magnon" concept and term has been entirely abandoned by science. The problem was that there was never a definition of what a "Cro-Magnon" supposedly was. No distinguishing set of physical characteristics, no distinctive physical culture, and now with our powerful genetic analysis tools - no distinctive genetic pattern. Their range of variation is within that of modern humans, and supposing they were a subspecies would be as well founded as declaring "Samoans" a subspecies since they are, like the "Cro Magnon" physically more robust on average than modern Europeans.
Mod parent up!
I haven't used it recently, but years ago I found the Matlab language and programming environment to be terrible - very primitive (which is why I haven't used it since). Sure, it has great libraries - it should considering the cost.
Mathematica is a wonderful programming environment, with equally powerful libraries (in many areas, far more powerful), and they have brought the cost of entry way down.
...though we could increase that by an order of magnitude by developing seawater extraction technology.
Good that you mentioned seawater extraction. If we did that for uranium then we would have a 10,000 year supply at current consumption rates. If we increase nuclear power 20-fold, to 250% of world electricity production today, it is still 500 years. If we implement breeding (I suspect we could get the bugs worked out by then) we are back up to a 50,000 year supply.
Where is the necessity of thorium?
...How do you plan on creating solar panels with no energy? it costs a mountain of coal/gas/oil to produce...
Where did all the energy go? Is solar energy tainted and unusable for making new solar panels? The energy payback time for current solar technology is 3 years, and steadily dropping. It should reach 1 year over the next decade.
You can with a fusion reactor.
How? They don't exist.
HELP!!!! I'm being held prisoner in /usr/games/lib!
