That appears to disagree with your earlier argument where you said:

Statutory name and legal name are essentially the same thing and you've already said that it doesn't have a statutory name. Otherwise we're just having a pointless semantic argument about what the "legal name" of a place even means. The US does have a board on Geographic names, that could be considered the authority on the legal names of places. The problem is that they have rules and the naming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America seems to break all their main ones except for the one about naming things after living persons since Vespucci has been dead for centuries. Favoring local usage is one of their most important rules though and that has clearly been broken. Changes are supposed to have a compelling reason. Also, since the Gulf of Mexico is almost entirely international waters, the rules on foreign names may or may not apply.

In any case, overall, it looks like the BGN would not be following its own rules in renaming the Gulf of Mexico, which would make it not a legal change, making it not the legal name. There is also the part in the law about giving "...full consideration to the specific interests of particular Federal
and State agencies." and the part about "...shall be designed to serve the interests of the Federal Government and the general public", both of which were clearly ignored. The violation of the bylaws and the statute that created the BGN to alter board membership and terms would also create a legal issue with the change if, indeed it can be considered to be a legal naming. It is the sort of thing that would need to be argued in court. However, the only entity that might be considered to have standing to sue would be the Associated Press, and they were more interested in the first amendment issues rather than the legality of the name change within the federal government.

In the end, for a plethora of reasons, it seems to me that, between the option of not really having a legal name, or the legal name being the Gulf of America, the facts seem to lean towards it not having a legal name. Also, this is all about someone's complaint that, if they use the name Gulf of America on a Wikipedia article, it will be reverted despite it supposedly being the "legal" name in the US. Of course, reverting it to Gulf of Mexico is very clearly the more neutral option since Wikipedia is international, the Gulf of America thing is clearly political, and the majority of people in the US do not support the name change. Therefore, using the internationally recognized English name in English language pages is clearly the proper choice.

Once again, you're not quite getting it. Opportunity cost requires weighing it against alternatives. The really tricky part is that not all of the alternatives will be known. For example, consider the opportunity cost of spending your time. There's a whole world of things you might do. Maximizing your return is hard to calculate, but if you compare two things like licking a spot on the wall for five hours versus going out on a date with your significant other, then, by most valuations, the opportunity cost of licking the wall is going to be pretty high. If your options are limited to licking a spot on the wall versus licking the table, and those are your only options, then the opportunity cost of choosing one or the other will probably be pretty low. Of course, it could always turn out that either the wall or the table actually houses a genie that will emerge from licking it and grant you three wishes if you will just please stop and never do that again because it's weird and the genie needs to see a therapist now.

Basically, you are talking about an opportunity cost to _not_ using nuclear power. That is not really the way it works. _Not_ using nuclear power is not a specific singular option or specific range of options. You actually have to have some idea of what the option or range of options that are the alternatives to using nuclear power (and that would preclude using nuclear power) are. Then you can compare them. You are not doing any sort of real cost-benefit analysis here. You are just declaring that nothing can beat nuclear power in any way without doing an evaluation. Hence it isn't reasonable to use the term opportunity cost, since you have not really analyzed what it would be.

You can keep repeating yourself all you want about your Germany vs. France numbers and I am not going to bother addressing it again since I already addressed it before and you made no attempt to rebut anything, you just ignored it.

Once again, I have been very clear, over and over and over that, in and of itself, I have no inherent problem with nuclear power. The waste problems are not really all that bad. The safety issues leave something to be desired since I am not a fan of things that require active human intervention to avoid catastrophic disaster or that fail catastrophically if automatic safety systems fail. I also don't like leaving a home empty of people while food cooks on a gas stovetop either. Same principle. However, those things are not showstoppers as I have said repeatedly. The problem is that nuclear is expensive, slow, and lacks flexibility. As it stands, renewables are relatively cheap, fast, and extremely flexible. Not producing radioactive contaminants or having the capability of turning a massive area of thousands of square kilometers into a disaster area on failure are just a bonus. Basically, you just have this nutty fixation that other people just don't understand nuclear power and believe all sorts of myths about it. You don't actually try to educate people about it though (mostly because the people you are arguing with about it typically seem to know more than you do) you just swear at them and insult them and repeat your small repertoire of talking points over and over while people just shake their heads and sigh.

Oh good grief. Are you even capable of going any deeper than that? Do you actually think just restating that again is an analysis? You're providing literally one data point from two different examples. Do you not get how inadequate that is?

Meanwhile, I would argue that it is _not_ the legal name insomuch as it doesn't have a statutory name, leaving everyone - except for Federal employees forced to follow his whims - free to use the real name. I mean he can call it whatever he likes, and you can follow along if you want, but the point is that he does not actually have the authority to unilaterally change the legal name. Even then, if the legal name were changed, Federal, State, and local governments lack the authority to force anyone other than government employees (and even then, only in their official duties, which means no firing them for not using on their own personal time or in any non-official capacity even during work hours) to use the updated name. Little thing called he Constitution.

Environmentally though, Delhi and some parts of California have a number of things in common. For example LA and Delhi both have very still air that allows smog to accumulate so that the problem is magnified. Basically, a lot of places can get away with polluting locally a lot more, but still having cleaner air. This is among the reasons that California has traditionally had its own stricter emissions controls than the federal ones.

As for polluting less, a large part of the problem is that there are regulations to prevent a lot of this pollution, but they are not followed for what I can only assume are political reasons. There really are better ways, for example, to handle the agricultural waste in the surrounding farms than by burning it, but that happens all too often.

True, but bear in mind that coal contains sulfur because it is fossilized plant matter that contained sulfur while it was alive. The residual organic matter from the crops most definitely contains sulfur. It can be more concentrated in coal, but the actual ratio between carbon and sulfur is going to be in the same general area. So you will definitely get sulfates from burning vegetable matter. Hard to say the exact concentration relative to burning fossil fuels.

Yeah, that stuff is definitely going to be in the mix as well. Once again, definitely better for human health to clear it from the air and have it end up in the water than remain in the air regardless of the problems of having it in the water (both to human health, and to infrastructure, etc.). The best thing would clearly be to just not have it in the air to start with though.

It's always bad math with you. It is very ironic considering your username. "Decays exponentially"... You do get that it is not exponential growth, but exponential decay, right? Have you looked at an exponential decay curve? Here's a hint, it is characterized by rapid initial decay, that becomes less rapid quite sharply and ends up in a very long tail. Understand that this is not to say that the radiation is particularly dangerous after a long time, just that your statement about exponential decay proving statements about thousands of years are untrue is a load of nonsense. It is not a good way to make an argument to anyone with mathematical literacy.

I think you entirely missed the point. The reason they are proposing promoting rain in the first place is so that the rain can clear the contaminants out of the air. The GP was pointing out that the tradeoff to this is that those contaminants being removed from the air in rain will mean that they end up _in_ the rain. The result of that tends to be acid rain. Now, as a tradeoff, acid rain is probably a better outcome for human health than the airborne pollution, so that is not a showstopper for this plan, but it is a consideration.

As the GP poster sensibly pointed out, polluting less is a better solution. Now, it is worth noting that Delhi has something in common with LA that makes air pollution especially problematic, and that is still air. It is one of the things that makes the LA area theoretically a good place for observatories because of the lower atmospheric distortion. The problem is that the still air also means that air pollution hangs around longer, so it can build up to much heavier levels over time. This has led to somewhat crazy ideas in the past for creating artificial wind flow in LA by constructing giant fans. LA air has gotten vastly cleaner over the decades with better pollution controls (one of the reasons that California has its own emissions standards that are stricter than federal ones). Delhi does not have the same level of pollution controls. Also, aside from traffic and poorly regulated industry, the area around Delhi also has a problem with unregulated field burning (if I recall from previous articles about this, it is technically regulated, but essentially completely unenforced) in the farmland around it. This is a traditional, but quite wasteful procedure. There are preferable options, like composting, or grinding agricultural waste into the soil to compost naturally. Burning is easy, but it produces large amounts of air pollution (note that this is not a greenhouse gas/climate change issue since this is part of the natural carbon cycle, but it is still air pollution) and it is also much more wasteful of nutrients that could be returned to the soil than other processes. So, in short, they could introduce more regulation and actually enforce those regulations. This is the 21st century, they could find out every instance of crop burning with satellite images and work on the farmers that are doing it. They could also promote and maybe subsidize other methods of doing things and hit the farmers with the option of paying a large fine, or joining some sort of diversion program to prevent doing it in the future.

Of course, I imagine this is a political issue. The local politicians are most likely scared of cracking down on rural farmers since they are probably an influential and conservative voting block. That still allows the option of trying to incentivize better behavior and promote programs to shift farmers to alternative ways of doing things though. In the end, the same applies with trying to move towards cleaner vehicles and cleaning up industry.

I am confused. Did Wales steal Wikipedia from Sanger as in your other post, or did Wales start Wikipedia himself as in this post? You do know that it can't be both, right?

"Investors"... Ok. Way to tell us that you know nothing about Wikipedia without saying you know nothing about Wikipedia.

I mean, that's just wrong. Gulf of America is not the legal name of the Gulf of Mexico in the US right now. The legal names of these things is set through legislation. Trump issued an executive order to rename it to federal agencies. That leads to the odd situation where federal agencies call it something other than the legal name because they have been ordered to, but that is a de facto change, not a de jurem one. The accepted international name and the legal US name are (in English) the Gulf of Mexico.

He "saved" the astronauts? I hardly think that falling back to a second form of transportation in what was already the existing contingency plan because plan A failed really counts as "saved". I mean, you can argue that LEO is a dangerous environment but, since they just swap astronauts out, even if the Dragon capsule had outraced a fireball from an exploding ISS like the Millenium Falcon, the net number of dead astronauts would not have changed. So that's a pretty extreme over-dramatization. As for the rest of what you wrote there... I can't even... You might want to seek some professional help.

Opportunity cost is a very basic concept. If any of your examples are even real (and I would love to see you actually cite something), then they would be examples of people who, like you, clearly do not understand the concept. I should mention that opportunity cost applies to more than just finance. It is very simple to understand. For a simple example, you have two opportunities, A and B, which are mutually exclusive. If you do A, the opportunity cost of A is whatever the benefits of B would have been. If you do B, the opportunity cost of B is whatever the benefits of A would have been. Just a name for a very basic concept. Now, sometimes, it may be a choice between A and B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, B6... Bn. In other words, the opportunity cost of one activity is the benefits of a large number of other activities that could have been completed, except that you did A instead. That sort of thing tends to happen when A ties up a large amount of resources, such as money and/or time.

So, basically, anyone who dismisses the idea of opportunity cost as important in decision-making simply is not qualified to assess what is financially viable or not. You, as made clear by your contention that "Opportunity cost is such as wall st douchebag term". That is simply an example of someone who is not living in the real world.

German CO2 emissions have been on a clear downward trend in all sectors. Especially the energy sector and especially over the last decade. There are no indications that reduction will stall any time soon. This is transitional, and it frankly would not have reduced that much if Germany had invested in nuclear plants a decade or even fifteen years ago instead, because the plants would only just be coming online now, and even then, just a fraction of them. Once again, another example of a form of opportunity cost is that the companies that they would have tapped to do the nuclear buildout would have built any such plants in stages over three or four decades (with over-runs running out to six to eight decades). Renewables (solar and wind, not so much giant dams) are just faster to build and deploy since they really can be made on assembly lines, unlike viable nuclear power plants.

The counterexample you provide of France is iffy. France has not built any nuclear plants since 1990 (apparently the last one was connected to the grid in 1999, almost a decade after "completion", which says something about the speed and adaptability of nuclear power) so their nuclear plants are 35 to 50 years old. The planned lifespan for the plants was 40 years, which leaves almost all of them at or beyond originally planned end of life. They can keep extending the lifespans of the plants, and they plan to, but there are significant diminishing returns on the costs of doing so with the massive amount of refurbishment that needs to be done in order to do that. As it stands, France's nuclear power management is a bit of a disaster. Basically, Germany is not anywhere near the disaster you claim (in fact, it's closer to a success story given its high latitude) while France is not really the success you claim.

As well, your statement is ridiculous because I made some points about the actual state of things in Germany in my last post and you simply completely ignored what I wrote and addressed nothing. As always, you are basically just being a pre-decided fanatic and refusing to even consider any other argument or point of view.

What? Someone on SlashDot who actually knows what words mean? Have we time-skipped back to 1999?

Better call my broker and tell them to dump those Enron shares . . .

It's a flex. Same reason people buy $1000 bottles of iffy vodka for their friends in a night club.

I didn't write that, the person I was replying to did, and you didn't even get the quote right. But I'm done here.