Comment Re:Moscow Mitch sez... (Score -1, Troll) 497
Moscow Mitch sez stop filibustering our law to fix the current background check system, which could have stopped many of the recent mass shooters.
Moscow Mitch sez stop filibustering our law to fix the current background check system, which could have stopped many of the recent mass shooters.
...but the democrats in congress filibustered it to prevent a vote because it had a majority and would have passed. Democrats don't want a solution to gun violence. They want to ban guns.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/...
There are two major weakness in our current background check system. 1) many states, localities, and agencies do not report felons to the list. 2) prohibited persons that illegally attempt to buy a gun are not prosecuted. This bill addresses these weaknesses.
From 2017-2019, republicans had the majority in the house and senate. However, in the senate, you need 60 votes to end a filibuster which the republicans did not have, and democrats vowed to filibuster any budget which included wall funding. So they could not pass a new budget, only the same continuing resolution (which only requires 50 votes to pass) that has been rolling forward since Obama. Trump grudgingly agreed to that continuing resolution in early 2018 to avoid a shutdown which the republicans claimed would hurt their midterm election results. But Trump vowed it would be the last time.
I think it is ironic that putting women in war games for the sake of diversity may backfire and end up desensitizing men to violence against women.
under the same banner as shouting fire in a theater? It's long since been agreed upon that the gov't can put reasonable restrictions on free speech. At this point we're just arguing over the definition of 'reasonable'. Preventing the existence of completely untraceable guns and the tech to make them seems 'reasonable' to me.
You can argue that point, you can even argue that I should be able to shout fire in that theater. But it's not fair to call the judge "activist" or declare the issue settled. In fact, at the moment it's pretty well settled against your line of reasoning.
There is nothing wrong with shouting "Fire" in a theater, provided there actually is a fire. The concern is of course not wanting people to shout "Fire" when there is no fire. However, the only way you can ensure no one can shout "Fire" when there is no fire, is to forcibly muzzle all theater-goers. This of course has the side-effect of preventing people from shouting "Fire" when there actually is a fire. Or speaking anything at all.
Uranium will never run out. We have enough depleted uranium sitting around unused as by-product of enrichment process to power the entire earth for 10,000 years if utilized in fast reactors. That is just the uranium sitting around in barrels now. Not including all known uranium deposits, all unknown uranium deposits, uranium recoverable from spent fuel, and uranium distilled from seawater. And not to even mention thorium, which is much more abundant than uranium.
A "tool" to understand costs of nuclear energy production from the "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". Could this tool be any more biased? I doubt it looking at the selected metrics.
Yes, it could be more biased. It could have been written by someone with no technical knowledge and a political agenda, like mdsolar.
First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated. After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years? It's a bit of a philosophical question, but point is - it can't really be estimated.
Yes, it can and has been estimated, by the nuclear industry and the department of energy.
More importantly, the "tool" seems to cover only construction costs. Nowhere are decommissioning costs included, which are order of magnitude over the construction costs. Experience has shown both in the US and elsewhere, that these costs have been (willingly or not) underestimated by order of magnitude by the industry.
This is just flat out wrong. Decommissioning costs are in the hundreds of million dollars, construction costs are in the billions. And they are included, by law, in the construction costs.
The lack of transparency help a large boom of the industry 30 years ago, but the lack of long term sight is kicking back in full force. Sad of an industry, which should secure waste thousands if not millions of years.
Let me be clear on my sight. I am actually in favour of sensible use and development of nuclear energy. But this cannot be done without transparency, hiding the real costs. Worse, I believe its the hiding of the real costs (and risks) that made this industry stagnate and sent it towards its death (lets be honest, Atomic industry is really dying). This tools seems only to continue this long tradition.
It's a lung cancer patient dying with a cigarette in the hand.
Just because you are not aware of how all the costs are calculated and accounted for in practice in the industry does not mean no one does, or that they are not accounted for at all. The only thing killing the nuclear industry these days is the natural gas business, but that is not permanent, it's due to huge supply increases with lack of transportation ability and slow demand shift. While gas is the best option today, power companies still want to build and maintain a nuclear fleet to have a diversity of energy source and not put their eggs all in one basket.
If they did and came to the conclusion that there was nothing illegal or corrupt about them, would you believe them? No, you would just call them shills for her campaign. So why bother. Let the left-wing media report on right-wing problems and let the right-wing media report on left-wing problems. That seems fair.
Fake likes is Facebook's entire business model. Getting rid of fake likes would be like McDonalds saying they are going to get rid of unhealthy food.
Excellent youtube video describing the problem with Facebook's commercialized likes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
This is exactly what's wrong with America. The majority is convinced convinced that our economy is broken because people aren't working hard enough.
That is true but probably not for the reason you think. The majority of people in the country do not work _at all_. And they are indeed concerned that the minority of the country, whom work to support them, are not working hard enough to support them with the lifestyle that they desire. And this is absolutely what is wrong with America - that people think they have the right to a middle class lifestyle on the backs of others.
Just letting student loans be discharged in bankruptcy can lead to a lot of stuff being fixed. It may force schools to cut costs
No, it will do quite the opposite. Colleges do not bear the risk of loans not being repaid, the taxpayers do. Making loans discharged would significantly increase the amount of debt students are willing to take on, because if they fail in their chosen career they can just start over fresh. The government will happily just eat the losses because it is a drop in the bucket to the federal budget. This will lead to higher tuition rates, more students taking on less socially useful degrees, and a further lower of higher education quality.
Your post is total hogwash. Just about everything you have said is completely 100% factually false. By "scientists" I assume you are referring to an actor portraying a scientist in an anti-nuclear power propaganda piece.
a) there is no large pool of water directly below the reactor
b) even if the fuel melted into a large reservoir of water, it could not become critical. It is not physically possible without the precise fuel and moderator arrangement present in an in-tact reactor configuration.
c) even if you somehow made the fuel become critical, it could not explode like a bomb. If a fuel mass became critical, it would simply heat up and disperse. Worse case is the heat would cause additional steam/fire to disperse more fission products. Let me reiterate: it is physically impossible for reactor fuel of any kind to produce a nuclear bomb type explosion. Nuclear bombs require extremely precise arrangement with unimaginably creative engineering to function.
d) if the fuel mass reached the water table, all that would occur would be another path for contamination in the local area which was already heavily contaminated. Fission products would not be magically transported throughout the whole continent, nor could an entire continent be made uninhabitable.
e) a power plant contains a couple orders of magnitude more fuel than a bomb. The contamination from a worse-case-scenario power plant accident is much higher than nuclear bombs would be, unless they were some sort of salted enhanced radiation bomb. For comparison, a typical nuclear power reactor creates as many fissions as a nuclear bomb about every 6 hours.
f) radiation does not spread like a contagion. This is just plain FUD.
The only part of your post which was even remotely accurate was about doomsday enhanced radiation bombs or salted bombs. No one has ever designed, built, or tested such a device and they are only theoretical. But theoretically, with enough salted bombs (meaning about 1000 times more than the entire world's nuclear stockpile at the height of the cold war) you could theoretically make most of the surface uninhabitable.
No.
The Democrats in the senate and Obama are the ones who shut down the government. The House crated a budget and the Demcocrats (specifically Harry Reid) refused to even bring it up for a vote in the senate. Regardless of whether you agree with the budget or think it is a bad deal, a budget was made. If the Democrats disagree with it and refuse to implement it that is perfectly fine and legal. But it's not the Republicans shutting down the government because they refused to give Democrats everything they demanded with no concessions. Democrats shut down the government, and used their influence in a sympathetic media to blame Republicans for it. And you fell for it, hook, line and sinker.
If you look at this list, the majority of these problems are man-made. Other than a super volcano and an asteroid impact, the solution seems pretty simple. We must abandon all technology and kill all but a small percentage of the population. And those that are left must live in isolated groups. That way there will not be a world wide disease outbreak.
So what you're saying is, the #1 threat to humanity is intellectuals making lists about the dangers to humanity?
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
