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Comment Re:They haven't solved any of the social problems (Score 1) 40

The containment buildings didn't contain the meltdown, and the emergency cooling system that was supposed to let them use external pumps diverted the water into holding tanks instead of the cores. There were many screw-ups, and even now they are behind schedule with the decommissioning and clean up.

Comment Re:They haven't solved any of the social problems (Score 1) 40

Chernobyl and Fukushima had the same root cause - too expensive. Chernobyl skimped on not bothering to build containment buildings or train people properly. Fukushima didn't build the necessary tsunami defences, despite being warned.

It's nuclear's Achilles' heel. Costs too much to be commercially viable, can't afford to be properly insured, and doesn't get the necessary level of investment once it's running.

Comment Re:The water cycle is a closed system. (Score 3, Informative) 59

It is not possible to "run out."

It is, however, *very* possible to neglect to build infrastructure to collect enough water from the environment to meet your specific needs.

You got it wrong. What they did is pump the aquifers dry and that caused the land to collapse. As a result, the natural storage of water in the land can no longer happen. They destroyed naturally occurring water infrastructure by pumping out all the water they could. This was an easily avoidable issue and they were warned this was happening and yet they did nothing.

Comment Not climate change. (Score 3, Informative) 59

Since at least 2008, scientists have warned that unchecked groundwater pumping for the city and for agriculture was rapidly draining the country’s aquifers. The overuse did not just deplete underground reserves—it destroyed them, as the land compressed and sank irreversibly. One recent study found that Iran’s central plateau, where most of the country’s aquifers are located, is sinking by more than 35 centimeters each year. As a result, the aquifers lose about 1.7 billion cubic meters of water annually as the ground is permanently crushed, leaving no space for underground water storage to recover, says Darío Solano, a geoscientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who was not involved with the study.

“We saw this coming,” Solano says.

Climate change did zero percent of the damage. Instead, what has occurred is 100% the result of idiocy. So yes, it has something in common with climate change but it's not the same thing at all.

Comment I hope you're embarrassed. (Score 2) 32

This is a specification for UNIX. ....

Wrong. Neither Linux nor UNIX are mentioned in the specification. However, it should be noted that the specification is hosted on Freedesktop.org which clearly states on their site that...

Freedesktop.org is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

They do mention Linux and Unix-like operating systems being target operating system. However, there is no mention of UNIX systems specifically. Additionally, nobody claimed it was exclusively Linux, only that it would impact Linux users.

Honestly, if I were you, I would be dreadfully embarrassed for making such a boisterous pronouncement only to be shown to be a obnoxious fool.

Comment So it's kind of like how Trump is president (Score 0) 59

Yeah you could for example point at the trans panic as the reason why Trump is President not once but twice because without that moral panic he couldn't have won but you'd also have to ignore all the voter suppression cheating and the sabotage the Republicans have done to the economy and the Republicans packing the courts allowing Trump to commit multiple crimes and get away with it and and and...

The Democrats insisting on running a woman when the country has made it crystal clear that they do not want a woman at top of ticket didn't help either.

Basically every single system had to collapse in order to make a has been game show host with 28 credible rape accusations president. Again..

So yeah you have multiple causes for a disaster a lot of times.

But take any one of those causes out and the disaster goes away. So I don't think it's unfair to say those things caused the disaster.

And in this case Iran is a relatively poor country that was trying to do a theocratic dictatorship by America in order to secure influence in the Middle East so it's not like they have a lot of say in reducing climate change. It's mostly a matter of the United states, the wealthier states of Europe and China. And you can hardly blame them for their corruption if you are an American since, well you caused it.

Of course pointing all this out is not going to endear you to Americans. We don't like to think about the consequences of our actions.

Comment It's going to be a miracle (Score 3) 13

If we don't have a 30 style crash. In addition to basically completely deregulating Wall Street and investment in general and all the other structural economic problems we are all just kind of pretending aren't there over and over and over again we are seeing crooks let off the hook by the current administration for no discernible reason except the blisteringly obvious one.

We are basically speedrunning a repeat of the lead up to world war II only this time we have nuclear weapons. But I'm sure it'll be fine right? Right?

Comment Yeah and that's the problem (Score 0) 40

It's the same stupid fucking pattern over and over again where you have wealthy elites who are well respected by the public and have control of the local media so the journalists will not discuss them critically.

There's nothing magic about being Japanese. Corruption and malfeasance are just things that human beings do everywhere.

The only country I have seen that I have the slightest faith in their ability to safely run nuclear reactors as France and that's because when France's ruling class tried to raise the retirement age to 62 there were riots in the streets.

I know those things don't seem connected but they are. It shows that the public there is not likely to let their betters run roughshod over them like America and Japan and frankly 99% of the rest of the world does.

The problem here is that elites can cause enormous disasters by taking huge risks that they are not personally culpable for and then get away with it because we have a different set of rules for them then we do for everybody else.

That is not by any stretch of the imagination in uncommon setup in the world. Frankly France is the odd man out here.

Comment You know you could Google (Score 1) 40

And read up on the history of the Fukushima disaster. You could read up on the long history of engineers warning that a large tsunami was going to cause a meltdown and that it could be easily prevented by reinforcing and building up the wall that protected the area in order to buy time and then having off-site generators that could be brought on to prevent the meltdown from happening.

The problem here isn't capitalism it's fascism. Specifically it's a ruling elite that is completely above the law. As the saying goes fascism requires an in-group that the law protects but does not bind and an outgroup that the law binds and does not protect. Japan has those things.

The engineers were in the out group and the CEOs were in the in group. So the CEOs could ignore the engineers warnings and get away with it but the engineers get blamed for causing a disaster they predicted and warned against.

This is the problem with having a ruling class. They can do bad things to you and get away with it because they are above the law.

Just because you don't like social problems doesn't mean social problems don't exist.

Comment They haven't solved any of the social problems (Score 0) 40

That caused the Fukushima disaster.

They still have a weak regulatory environment for businesses. Remember folks the public blamed the engineers for the disaster not the CEOs who wouldn't listen to the engineers when they were told that the next big tsunami would cause a disaster and that they need it off site generators and to reinforce the storm wall.

The engineers knew that the Fukushima reactor was going to melt down. It wasn't if, it was when.

And I will say it again, the public blamed the engineers. Not the CEOs who ignored the engineers.

That culture has not changed in the slightest. The technical problems with nuclear have been solved but the social problems have not.

And before anyone chimes in it's true that nuclear has a lower death count but try telling that to anyone in the city who lost all of their property when they had to evacuate Fukushima for 10 years. And remember the CEOs responsible all got away with it. Not a single one of them did a single day in jail

Comment Re:Good products (Score 1) 102

Netflix and YouTube both use AV1, which is royalty free.

You're right about YouTube. I was thinking HEVC was one of their delivery formats, but apparently not.

Netflix definitely did use HEVC for delivery of some of its high-end content at one time. Whether they still do or not, I have no idea.

Either way, the fact that people are running into error messages suggests that there is some actual customer impact.

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