Here's Heritage's numbers
Why not give us Marvin the Martian's numbers too? For all the time the Heritage Foundation has cooked the books on their reporting, you might as well just give us Glenn Beck's numbers.
"Figures don't lie, but the Heritage Foundation Does"
Military budgets were higher as a result of Iraq and Afghanistan, but you'd have to count the entire military budget as "war costs" to reach even $4T, much less $6T.
Well, it adds up pretty fast when you look at the lost productivity of the men and women who went to fight and the fact that now we're on the hook for a lifetime of medical care for every single one of them, plus other benefits, and a lot of them came back very broken, with pieces missing and will require expensive medical care for the rest of their lives.
When you see the $4-6 trillion figure for the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you're looking at more than just the cost of bullets and MREs. The notion of True Price Accounting, where you look at the externalities of a product, service or government policy, is actually quite useful. It gives us a good idea of the true costs of things. A former CIA guy named Robert David Steele has written a few books on this topic and they're quite illuminating. He's also the guy who wrote a book called "Open Source Everything" which is a very interesting take on government and information.
So, if Apple intends for your iPhone to only last a year, why do they sell 2 year AppleCare plans, again?
My point was not that the products actually do last more than a year. My point is that sleazy Apple purposely borks their old hardware with updates so you have to buy a new gadget.
The notion that the best we can hope for, paying $900 for an iPhone 5 (64gig) is that it last 12 months is absurd. And you're saying, "Well, what do you expect?"
I guess I can't tell if you're trying to cover for Apple or if you agree with me in hoping that people figure it out.
> What has carbon dating to do with backround radiation?
If you looked up how carbon dating works, you'd know the answer to that.
No one promised you could own something that works for more than a year.
Then why do they sell 2 years worth of AppleCare?
I'm guessing if you were to ask Tim Cook, "Say, you scrawny little Cryptkeeper-looking fuck, will your product work for more than a year?", I bet he'd tell me about all this customers that are still using 60gig iPods and swear to God that Apple isn't doing what everyone here knows they're doing, which is borking anything over a year old. Then, he'd ask if I've ever seen a grown man naked.
External events are considered in US plant design already, this author seems to be a bit ignorant on how the safety case for plants is built. Who cares if we refine the probability of an event is if the plant is already designed to withstand it?
Technically, the Fukushima plant was also already designed to withstand this type of event. It had sufficient backup power systems necessary to continue operating the cooling pumps in the event of a catastrophic disaster of this type.
Where they screwed up was in the redundancy of the backups. This is unfortunately a fairly common failure mode in engineering designs. Say a single diesel generator has a 10% chance of failing to start up if you try to run it during an emergency. People then naively think that if you just put 6 diesel generators into the design, then that reduces the statistical probability of failure to 1 in a million. The chance of all six generators failing is (10%)^6 = 1 in a million.
That's the correct math for generator failures due to independent internal causes. But everything changes when you talk about external causes. Suddenly you have a cause like, oh, say, a tsunmai, which can affect all the generators simultaneously. The failure mode for each generator is no longer independent, and your redundancy does nothing to decrease the odds of a failure. All they had to avoid this effect was put the generators and diesel fuel tanks in different places. But no, the typical Japanese obsession with order and symmetry* mandated that they put all their generators in a row in the same place. And the tsunami took them out and contaminated their fuel all at once. Indeed the two newer Fukushima reactors where the generators and fuel were stored in a different location got through the earthquake and tsunami just fine.
* I rag on the Japanese, but the same thing happened with the Space Shuttle Challenger. They were having problems with poor O-ring seals in the solid rocket boosters. So to reduce the probability of a failure, they just added more O-rings. That worked to stop the independent failures (burn-through due to improper seating of an O-ring in one spot). But when an external factor popped up which caused all O-rings to fail simultaneously (cold weather), the safety of the redundant O-rings was negated.
Windows 8 has more features than Windows 7, in fact they tacked on an entire new and separate UI over the desktop. Yet, it runs faster and makes better use of memory. It makes better use of SSDs and cuts boot times down a lot. Just adding features should not slow an OS down, as features are mostly only loaded when needed and memory management should be able to handle background stuff.
Actually the earthquake did damage the plant in a very critical way. The emergency cooling system was broken, so that even when they started pumping in water from fire engines it didn't cool the cores and they went into meltdown.
I suggest you try watching this documentary: http://youtu.be/ldki2ji5-gU
Contamination is quite reversible
Yes, but the effects of short term contamination are not. The evacuated towns in Japan are pretty much being abandoned now, because even when they do manage to fully decontaminate them there will be no-one to live there. All the former residents have had to move on with their lives, find homes and jobs elsewhere, go to other schools and try to start some kind of new life.
Those communities, those businesses are all gone for good.
When someone has to rely on an ad-hominem you can take it as read that they don't have any specific criticisms. I somehow knew the first comment would be an hominem.
Brown University isn't named for what you think it is. Go back to your German niche porn.
we will have those costs for the Iraqi war
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss
