No argument, it was you how brought up the comparison with empires of yore, and then mentioned Sweden in the next breath.

Whether you'd look worse... Good question. "We" were pretty bad, so I'm not sure that's aiming very high. However, the world has also changed, we're much more peaceful now, so an absolute comparison is fraught with difficulty anyway.

Well, by that token, so were many others on your list. Also, those that covered lots of land, often ruled vast "empires" of no-one, as many of the areas where they ruled didn't have much of a population to begin with (the Mongols come to mind here).

The British ambasador of the time did after all tell the Swedish monarch that Sweden's natural border in the east ought to be considered to stop at the shores of the black sea. The crown didn't think the Swedes had any natural claim beyond that (and schemed to start another war with Russia to put a stop to that). So, "our" influences well beyond the local region were considerable at the time.

So, in short, I'm not really arguing with your basic premises, just picking a nit regarding comparisons between "empires" and "Sweden" being invalid. Historically it's not a stretch.

Problem is that UNIX services doesn't actually tell you when they're ready to "provide", the init system is based on the notion of having told something to start, not actually having it available.

So, until you address that any prioritization is going to be a kludge at best. It's no use telling a system that something requires something else, until you can actually guarantee that that something else is actually available.

Fun fact, systemd doesn't address this either. Well, there are some kluges in the form of initd like behaviour, but by and large its still the old "spawn off a process and cross your fingers"-approach to service provisioning and dependency resolution. Only a lot more complicated for not much improvement. "Lots of screaming for little wool, said the woman that sheered the pig..." as the Swedish saying would have it.

P.S. Of course, whether you number or name these things doesn't make one bit of difference. But with numbering at least, you're not fooling yourself into thinking that you're getting something you're not.

Not with the list you put up above. To quote the previous start of the entry for Sweden in the CIA world fact book "Though a military super power in the 17:th century..."

So if you can compare the US to the holy roman empire, then you can compare it to Sweden. The 30 years war for example, was the first true world war and it lasted three times as long as the two the US has been involved in, combined. There were plenty of people who said "the Swede will save us!" (and for a time we actually did), just about as many as sang "Sleep, child, sleep, for tomorrow comes the Swede".

Not that I'm particularly proud of this moment in history, mind you, but it happened all the same.

Yes they do. I know its popular to say otherwise, but that's mostly management speak.

What is true though is that we don't know how to quantify that difference and that there are many confounding factors, such as good people tend to flock to the good tools. And that doesn't necessarily mean good for everybody, but good for good people. (In the Haskell community that's know as the "Wow, we're floored by the quality of applicants we get when we post a Haskell job. Didn't know there were programmers like that out there..."

That this trivially true shouldn't be hard to convince oneself of as the argument is basically "Doesn't matter if we equip our troops with the Springfield 1861 rifled musket, or the fancy shmanzy, new and expensive Mauser 1891. After all they're both rifles, and everybody knows it's the rifleman that makes the difference, not the rifle."

Yes, the skill of the rifleman is very important. Critical even. Doesn't matter what rifle you give a bad rifleman, he'll miss as well with a cheap, crappy obsolete one, as a state of the art one. And likewise, a true virtuoso will perform feats of magic whatever you hand him. BUT, and that's a big "but", that doesn't mean that the differences in all other cases, don't matter. A good rifleman will cherish the opportunities the improvements bring, and a bad one will suck less. Sometimes much, much, less.

(And paradoxically, good performers seem to have a preference for simpler tools, that are easier to use for everybody, not the other way around, as you might think. That's probably because good performers tend to practice, and perform, a lot more than the average Joe, and hence are more exposed to their inevitable mistakes, always working to correct them. Extra complexity, for complexities sake, is hence seldom appreciated by the consummate professional.)

Doesn't mean that other things aren't just as, or even more, important, but don't for a minute delude yourself into thinking that the actual tools of the trade doesn't matter. The saying: "It's a poor carpenter who blames his tools", is meant to warn against poor carpenters, not condone poor tools.

Because everybody feels bad about something. So, if "it made me feel bad" is supposed to be the brightline then we cannot have even a rational thoughtful discussion about anything.

You're in good company.

Swedish ones. What american ones do, or don't on their time I don't know about, and can't answer for. You know that the Swedish green party is actually part of the cabinet? They can't be running around blowing up dams, that'd just hurt them in the polls...

Don't know. Didn't mention the Deepwater horizon "incident".

Nope. You must be thinking about someone else.

Nope. Not when it comes to BP at least. They're still doing OK. Dropped from second to fourth largest oil company in the world, but far from bankrupt. Still showing a healthy profit. And the largest shareholder in BP is, you guessed it, Britain. (It was even majority owned, until Thatcher couldn't leave well enough alone.) So they're a bad example, being government owned. You need to look to private industry to find the real weasels.

You mean like "The United States Oil Pollution Act of 1990 limits BP's liability for non-cleanup costs to $75 million unless gross negligence is proven.". You'd be wrong to assume that the nuclear industry is the only large industry that gets to call the shots.

OK, maybe you misunderstood me. Whether it makes sense or not is not the issue. Whether it is "right" or "wrong" is not the issue either. The issue is that private companies do weasel out of paying, and they do so using wholly legal means. (It's not for nothing that oil tankers are often owned by completely separate entities, that can go bankrupt with no ill effects for the company that's actually making the money off of those oil shipments) Whether you like it or not, that's what's going to happen more often than not, especially when we talk about catastrophic events, such as the Tsunami that hit Japan, killed ~15000 people, destroyed large tracts of land, and yes, flooded a nuclear reactor emergency generator system.

You would need to change a lot of law to make that impossible. And as you can't even make these companies pay their bloody taxes as it is, lots of luck with that.

In Sweden, most of our nuclear reactors are owned by the government (wholly owned corporations), so of course the government is going to pay for the eventual disaster, one way or the other. (And since they're not allowed by law to take out insurance, that would be stupid, it's a completely moot point anyway).

So that the government assumes responsibility for what they're going to end up assuming responsibility for anyway isn't as stupid as it sounds. What is stupid, is that you seem perfectly happy with letting the private owners make off with the proceeds in the meantime. That is something you should start looking into.

"The people that died", you mean the ~ 16000 that died in one of the worst Tsunamis in modern history? Those people? Or the approximately zero people that died as a direct or indirect result of Fukushima?

Or the untold people that lost everything, houses, land, the lot, as a result of said Tsunami, or the much, much smaller number of people who have to move from their houses because of the Fukushima exclusion zone? Those people?

Look, what makes us not take you lot seriously is that you have absolutely no sense of scale. This was a catastrophic disaster that struck Japan. Thousands upon thousands of people died or lost everything. Many of the areas hit won't be rebuilt for generations as the wherewithal, economy etc. isn't there to make that happen. Only the economic loss was staggering. And you go on and on about one tiny corner of that, where no-one died, no-one is probably going to die, and the economic impact is limited, especially compared to the rest of Japan that was devastated.

If you had a sense of scale about these things, you would understand that a nuclear disaster is every bit as "linear" as a large hydro dam failure. We are in no way shape or form at the level of "asteroid-that-killed-the-dinosaurs". Even the worst nuclear accident imaginable (Tjernobyl if you wonder) is a very localised affair (country, maybe continent), that's over in a jiffy, compared to your killer meteorite. (In fact contrary to a large dam failure, nature actually thrives in the nature preserve that is the Tjernobyl exclusion zone.) We couldn't effectively hurt the survival of human kind with nuclear weapons, let alone civilian nuclear energy.

So, we're very much still in the linear part of the spectrum. That you nuclear detractors don't realise this, even getting the idea to comparing a puny nuclear reactor blowing up to a large asteroid, is what makes it impossible to take you seriously.

Nope. Tjernobyl had one count 'em, one reactor blow up (no 4). The other three reactors continued to operate for years after the catastrophic loss of no 4. Now, Fukushima had almost complete meltdown of one reactor, and partial meltdown of two more (but then again, TMI had a more severe meltdown than most of those, to no ill effect). However, these all happened from the same proximate cause, there was no chain reaction or anything of that nature, so counting reactors is a fools game anyway. If Fukushima had had fewer larger reactors, then it wouldn't have been as serious an accident according to you? Or if it had had ten with five melting (instead of three of six) it would have been a more serious accident? Patent nonsense.

So this is why your analysis is basically flawed. If you want to compare then you need a unit of measurement that makes that comparison invariant of e.g. "how many reactors", and for example takes size into account. What you're doing is akin to counting the number of oil spills rather than the severity.

In power generation it's customary to compare given the amount of energy produced. Sure, a nuclear accident is bad, but we get tons of energy from it. It's like air travel safety, sure, one plane crash is bad, but you get to go a long way, quickly and cheaply, so compared to the options all of a sudden flying doesn't look that bad anymore. Now, answering your question, "What do we do in energy production that's as dangerous as nuclear". The answer is, perhaps surprisingly "everything else". Dams in particular are a large scale killer like no other... Many, many, many, more people have died en masse per kWh due to dam failure than anything else, but in total of course it's dwarfed by coal. Even wind and solar is more dangerous than nuclear, and that's a conservative estimate. Just google "death per kilowatthour", and you'll find no lack of sources to list the actual numbers. Coal is easily a factor of thousand more dangerous than nuclear, and guess what, they don't even pay for their damage, let alone insure against it.

Quite a few of us how have them, yes and that includes "environmentalists". Sure, they're not without their problems, environmentally, but they have a quite a few upsides as well.

Sure, but what I was pointing out (in a roundabout way), is that the same is effectively true of any large scale infrastructure system, especially when it comes to power generation on a massive scale. Doesn't matter if the cost comes from a hydro electric dam that fails, or a coal ash slurry dam failure, or a major oil spill, or indeed a release of radio nucleotides.

If that much money is at stake there are many ways for those that earn money off of the business to protect themselves from damage. Bankruptcy is always cheaper than insurance. Especially when there is no data for the insurance industry to go on (as is the case with large scale catastrophes).

So, it doesn't matter if the nuclear industry doesn't have insurance, since many/most other human endeavours on that scale doesn't either. And even if they did, it wouldn't cover the actual cost anyway, you'd just look at years and years of litigation and ass covering, with very little hard cash in the end to show for it. (To wit the Exxon Valdes spill and the legal aftermath. It didn't seem to hurt Exxon nearly as much as it did Prince William sound.

If you want to construe that as an argument for making these types of endeavours government owned and operated, go ahead, I think that could be argued.

What are your numbers then? Tjernobyl one reactor, Fukushima one reactor (or are you counting multiples there?), vs 443 power generating ones according to Google, that gives me 0.455% let's say 0.5%.

And that's even assuming that number of failed reactors / total, is even a good metric, something I'm not nearly convince of.

"Citation needed."

Neither does hydro dams. Most dams are "insured by the government", i.e. there is no insurance, just like for nuclear. And that doesn't seem to stop anyone from extolling the virtues of hydro electricity even in the face of a very long list of dam failures. You know, a billion here and a billion there, it adds up....

Yepp. It's not for nothing that the first thing a doctor will tell you as the answer to the "What do I do now"-question that inevitably results from a positive test is: "Have more tests".

Initial screening tests are often less accurate, since that inevitably makes them quicker and cheaper. That's why they're called screening tests. The odd positive results is just confirmation that better, slower, more expensive tests should be done.