You say that like it's an unassailable force of nature. It's not. This has been a problem throughout most of human history, and there's a relatively simple solution: tariffs. No, they're not popular in our free-trade embracing modern political climate - but that climate was orchestrated at considerable expense by the wealthiest members of our nation - those who stand to make enormous profits from the arangement while the rest of us suffer. Because one of the truths of free trade is that, as you point out, in a free market all wages must inevitably fall to match those of the lowest-paid workers within the free-trade zone.

Either we must reinstate protectionist measures, or resign ourselves to remaking our country in the image of the worst oligarchies with whom we share free-trade agreements with.

Your problem is that you seem to think Obama is working for us, relatively normal Americans. He's not. He has arguably done a few things somewhat on our behalf, mostly symbolic, but by and large he works for the same billionaires that fund the campaigns of virtually all major politicians. And the policies that benefit those handful of ultra-rich rarely benefit the 99%. Things like enabling a flow of cheap, skilled, semi-indentured labor into the country to displace educated Americans with our outrageous expectations of decent pay and benefits that cut into corporate profits and executive bonuses.

This has been the case for decades, arguably centuries, though the problem has been accelerated precipitously since the Citizens United ruling that corporate spending is protected free speech. And it will only get worse until we the people rise up and refuse to vote for these corporate lapdogs, and show that our democracy cannot be bought indefinitely. Until then the problems can only be expected to get worse.

For now, it seems Bernie Sanders is the only credible candidate to run for president on such a platform in generations - and for that alone I would vote for him, even if I didn't agree with many of his positions.

True, but most infrastructure doesn't risk damage over thousands of square miles or potentially geologic timescales.

A good starting point would be to stop subsidizing fossil fuels by indemnifying producers and consumers from environmental damage caused by their negligence. I'm not even talking about global warming here - coal mining and power plants dump horrifying amount of toxic and radioactive waste into the surrounding environment - thousands of times more than is permissible for a nuclear plant. Oil producers have liability caps in case of spills that are laughable compared to the actual clean-up costs, and fracking is indemnified from any liability for ground-water contamination or geological destabilization (aka earthquakes), even if conclusively proven that they were responsible. Make them all bankroll the risks of their industry instead of offloading the expense to citizens, and the price of fossil energy would rapidly increase so much that the alternatives would be cheap in comparison.

Not so. Nuclear fuel isn't actually meaningfully radioactive - it's fissile, so when bombarded by neutrons it shatters (aka fissions), but leave it alone and it will decay so slowly that it emits essentially no radiation. Basically the longer the half-life, the less radioactive the material, and nuclear fuel has a very long half life - it has after all been present since long before our planet formed from the remnants of ancient supernovas. Uranium-235, the most common fuel, has a half-life of 700 million years. Plutonium-239, the other common fuel, has a half-life of "only" 24,000 years, but the banana you just ate is still far more radioactive than a warehouse full of freshly refined nuclear fuel.

Shatter it in a fission reactor though, and the resulting fragments tend to be very radioactive. Some are *extremely* radioactive, with half-lives in the range of hours to weeks, but store those for a few years and they pretty much completely decay into inert atoms, so they aren't a big problem. Dealing with those is why spent fuel typically has a "cooling off period" of a few years before being shipped away from the nuclear plant.

Most fragments though have half-lives in the range of a few months to many years - short enough to be dangerously radioactive, but long enough to present some challenges for storage - it will take many centuries to decay to safe levels. Still, bury it in a nice deep hole in good dry, stable ground, and it will probably decay to safe levels before it manages to escape. Something like Yucca Mountain would likely be well suited to this.

The REAL problem though is that current reactor designs only consume a few percent of the fuel, and then we go and store that highly radioactive waste still all mixed in with the 90+% of unused fuel. And that gives us the worst of both worlds - it's highly radioactive, and as the waste decays it releases a bunch of energetic neutrons which cause some of the surrounding fuel to fission, creating fresh new waste to replace the stuff that just went inert. The combination of waste and fuel will thus remain dangerously radioactive until all the fuel has been converted to waste, a process that will take tens to hundreds of thousands of years. And on those timescales there's no realistic way to contain it reliably, you're starting to get into geological timescales there, and there's no longer any such thing as stable ground.

THAT is why fuel reprocessing (or radically better reactors) are important - not just because it reduces the amount of waste, but because it simultaneously radically reduces the time it will take that waste to become inert, down to timescales where human ingenuity can at least hope to contain it.

Nah. "Depleted" implies that at some point in the past there was a greater concentration. From what I've seen and read, rational humans have always been only slightly more common than unicorns. At best we find the occasional person who is moderately rational in their approach to one or two relatively small fields of endeavour.

Alternately, the "disposal problem" exists largely because advances in uranium mining made it substantially cheaper to mine and refine fresh fuel than reprocess "spent" fuel. (also, because suitable containment sites don't, and can't, exist). Originally reprocessing was the norm - you take your "spent" fuel, separate out the reaction-damping fission products, and return the ~95% of unused fuel to be used again. The fission products left over are then pretty much the same relatively short-lived waste that modern high-efficiency reactors would be producing.

Granted, reprocessing is expensive and dangerous, but fuel only represents a few percent of the lifetime costs of a typical nuclear reactor, and reprocessing it means your get 10-20x less waste, and that it is relatively safe after only a few centuries of storage, making it easy to create suitable storage facilities. Unlike the current situation where we store the highly radioactive fission products thoroughly mixed into the otherwise inert fuel, so that new waste continues to be bred for hundreds of thousands of years - timescales which make any claim that a storage facility is "suitable" completely laughable. Sure, maybe it will contain the radioactive waste for hundreds, even thousands of years, but then we'll have a *real* problem on our hands - our first warning of leakage from something like Yucca mountain would be when waste has finally percolated into the ground-water and started poisoning people hundreds of miles downstream. At which point containment has been so thoroughly breached that cleanup is probably not realistically possible, even assuming that any records of the storage facility still exist, and that civilization hasn't collapsed in the meantime. (And realistically it probably will have, repeatedly. Human civilization is only a few thousand years old, and it has already collapsed at least a few times in any given region. And future rebuilding will likely be much more difficult without readily available fossil fuels to power it)

Of course it would be better all around to simply use a newer reactor that can much more completely consume the fuel in the first place, though unless you're getting almost 100% usage fuel usage reprocessing would still be a good idea before storage.

> If both parties are reasonable and aren't just trying to screw the other person, then there's no reason you need lawyers to get involved.

Almost. Where you may want to get a lawyer involved is to finalize the paperwork to ensure that (1) the often byzantine paperwork actually expresses the agreement you both intend to make. And (2) the agreement is fully legally binding in case of future disputes. Just because your partner agrees to certain conditions today doesn't mean that they won't want to "reinterpret" the agreement at some later date. Or worse, your (ex-)partner's past or future creditors, lawsuits, etc. may decide that a sloppily worded agreement gives them a route to try to lay claim to your assets, despite the fact that you both agree that they no longer hold any stake in them. Especially important since the legal system is rich in repurposing everyday terms as specialist "terms of art" whose definitions can depart subtly or dramatically from their everyday usage. Can't think of an example offhand, but I remember coming across a few doozies over the years. Likely on Groklaw.

Not just because they're subservient and uneducated, no. But if they draw heavily on the mannerisms and stereotypes of a *particular* racial caricature - traits that were firmly established as racist shorthand long before the nonhuman character was created? Yeah, I think there'd be a strong argument to be made that you were invoking the entirety of that caricature by reference, no matter what color or shape the character was.

Unfortunately it's not quite that simple. I'm not going to take any position on whether Jar Jar was or was not racist, much less whether he was *intentionally* racist, which can be a completely different thing. Just bare with me for a moment:

Consider blackface comedy - if you've never seen any, go watch a few samples on youtube or somewhere, I'm sure you can find some atrocious examples, even though the stereotype was long fading by the time film became common. Or just think of the worst racial stereotype you can bring to mind.

Now ask yourself two questions - hopefully you'll come to substantially the same conclusions so that my argument makes sense:
Does the portrayal accurately represent black people? No, certainly not - that's a large part of why it's so insulting.
Does the portrayal present a semi-coherent and deeply insulting stereotype of black people? Most assuredly yes.

Now for the complicated question: if you saw a white guy in some comedy club playing a bumpkin by adopting that same behavioral stereotype, without any reference to black people, would it be racist?

Now, if you had never seen blackface your answer would probably be no - he's just some dude acting like a lazy idiot for laughs. Maybe it's insulting to lazy idiots, but hey, they're fair game, right? But consider how your feelings might change if you had grown up being the target of that caricature. If you had seen those costumes and mannerisms used to belittle yourself and your entire race for decade after decade. Would the fact that the guy wasn't actually wearing black makeup really make you feel okay about the act? Or would you just see a guy doing blackface without the makeup, with all the racial slurs embedded in that caricaturization?

Agreed, he sounds only vaguely like a *real* Jamaican accent. However, he sounds very much like a *stereotypical* Jamaican accent.

You may as well say that styling a character on traditional blackface comedy isn't racist, because blackface comedy wasn't actually a reflection of real black people. No, it wasn't - that's the entire reason it's so racist. If you're actually accurately representing a subclass of people then the potential for racism is limited - you may laugh at the otherness a bit, but it's by grossly exaggerating the differences into an insulting caricature that you create something deeply offensive. And once that caricature is established in the culture as a stereotype, a non-verbal insult, simply removing the most obvious reference to its racial roots doesn't eliminate the racism. The caricature stands on its own, invoking the mentality that created it to all who recognize it.

And incidentally, I seem to recall a number of prominent native Jamaican media personalities complaining about Jar Jar at the time - and frankly, if there's anyone fit to recognize a racist caricature, I'd say it's the targets - people who have lived their lives on the receiving end of those thinly-veiled insults. Perhaps they may be over-sensitive, but that same sensitivity also highlights in glaring relief the commoditized racism that people who have never been targeted may overlook entirely. (I grew up in a heavily Hispanic community, and to this day being called "white boy" or "gringo" will raise my hackles, even in the most friendly of contexts - and I have the benefit of being on the "winning" side of racial conflict, so the name really only brands me as "other", not "lesser")

The thing is, you don't have to intend for a racist slur to be insulting for it to be so - the insult has been baked into the slur by decades of abuse. Just as saying "red" invokes a mental impression of a certain color to anyone with color vision, so saying "nigger" invokes a mental impression of a judgment of subhuman worth to anyone familiar with the words recent history. And invoking a racist caricature does the same to anyone who has been sensitized to that caricature, even if it's done by a nonhuman CG character.

Not so. Typically if you *completely* remove a cancerous tumor it stays gone - though the risk factors that led it to forming in the first place may lead to new cancers forming in the future. (Also worth noting - not all tumors are cancerous - apparently the terminology has changed (or I misunderstood in the past) such that only malignant tumors are termed cancerous. Not that benign tumors can't kill you - a well-contained lump in the wrong place can still cause fatal complications, but it won't be rebel cell-clusters overwhelming your body that kills you.

That said, completely removing a cancer can be challenging, for a couple reasons:
1) Malignant tumors can metastasize, with cell clusters breaking off in the blood stream and "colonizing" distant parts of the body. Often such secondary tumors will remain microscopic due to the primary tumor releasing growth-suppressing chemicals - at least until it's removed, at which secondary tumors may begin growing rapidly. I believe this is one of the reasons chemotherapy is often employed before a planned surgery - with luck it will both shrink the edges of the tumor, and kill off most of the potentially hundreds of other tiny cancers while they're still too small to detect

2) Historically there hasn't been any easy way to distinguish between healthy and cancerous cells during surgery,with malignant tumors often "infecting" the surrounding tissue as well as the well-defined tumor. And if you leave even one cancerous cell behind it will probably regrow. That's poised to change though, there was a woman on TED a year or two ago that came up with a way to bind an injectable fluorescing dye to only cancerous cells* - exploiting one of the characteristic metabolic quirks I believe. So shine a UV lamp on the surrounding tissue after the main surgery and if anything glows, scrape that out too. Currently the accepted technique is to take post-surgical biopsies from several points around the site for testing, and then schedule a second surgery if there is any further cancer detected. Of course you basically have to just hope that any problem areas get biopsied.

*She also worked out how to bind a second color dye to only nerve cells, allowing for much safer surgery around nerves, particularly extremely fine ones that aren't readily visible. Some cool footage for the non-squeamish http://www.ted.com/talks/quyen...

That would depend heavily on the strain of Buddhism. In at least several the part that "will be back" is explicitly not "I" in any meaningful sense. In fact it seems like a common theme is that "I" is an illusion, and thus not only can't meaningfully come back, but was never really there to begin with.

Well, if it was "initial alien assault" or "acute environmental UV exposure" then the millions soon to follow might like the warning...

That would be interesting data, but I'm not sure how useful it would be for seeing trends, at least predictive ones - what with the technological shifts in productivity.

In the US at least I suspect part of the problem is that, as I recall, early last century, during the WWI/II labor shortages, there were certain limits on "head hunting" put in place. One of the outshoots being that non-monetary compensation such as retirement and medical insurance became a standard feature in compensation packages - which had the effect of both reducing worker mobility, and provided incentive to overwork employees since a large portion of the compensation package did not scale with hours worked. That puts us in a position now where it's substantially cheaper for a company to work one employee 60 hours than two employees 30 hours each. A contributing factor to our 12-15% unemployment rate (it's actually something like 30% for those in their early twenties, and far worse for young minorities. If *that's* not a disaster in the making I don't know what is)