So, how does this compare to ongoing NK atrocities, including starvation and stunted mental and physical growth among a very large portion of NK children? I may trigger Godwin's law here, but NK is, scaled by population, worse than nazi Germany.

Actually I didn't forget about that. I think the NK ongoing atrocities are worse than having to combat that artillery and suffer heavy losses from it. But perhaps the window of opportunity has been missed. If NK can reliably deliver nukes to Seoul and a few other cities, then perhaps it is statistically better to just wait and see.

I worry, though, that the NK regime will fall and decide to go out with a bang. For one thing, Kim Jong-Un was caught with bondage porn as a student in Switzerland. A sadist losing his grip may very well decide to unleash whatever destructive power he has at his disposal. OTOH, a palace coup may fix that. Hopefully, though, this is all part of US/SK contingency planning. I can only hope that TPTB knows what they're doing and not doing.

Your argument has merit, my friend. If the South Koreans don't want to, then that's their choice. One cannot ask SK people to sacrifice lives in a cause they don't believe in. I'm a Swede and I'm unlikely to participate in any effort on the Korean peninsula. I certainly won't volunteer.

However, my belief is that total suffering would be less if NK was liberated and reunified by force. The atrocities of the NK regime toward its own people is beyond belief. (If you don't know of them, please google.) War is somewhat worse, but of much shorter duration. And war might come even if we try to avoid it - alas NK is improving their nuclear arsenal as we speak and later wars will likely be worse.

But I certainly hope that the NK regime will fall soon and without war. This has been the gamble for the last few decades, and with luck, it may eventually happen.

South Korea should simply take out those jamming trucks with missiles. If that escalates into a war, then that may be for the best. North Korea should have been liberated by force at least ten years ago. It was a much better target than Iraq, and a much nobler cause. What NK does to its own people is, on a per-capita basis, about as bad as it gets.

GDP correlates very well with everything else you'd like, and globalization is our best tool to further and broaden this human golden age. The "Cina slave labor" as you call it, is getting rapid increases in wages and hundred of millions are lifted from poverty each decade. Your suggestions sounds good, superficially, but they would create untold suffering if applied.

I fully agree about revolutions and smashing existing structures. The Occupiers doesn't realize that what we've got in the mature capitalist democracies is an improvement over anything that has been seen throughout human history. We actually have an open access social order whose foundation is free entry to competition for positions in economy and politics. This is new and rare. The norm has been that the social order is created by rent-seeking elites limiting access to positions. There is a fairly new academic framework on this: http://www.nber.org/papers/w12795

It's very heartening that the book reviewed here is not only anti-capitalist, but also peak oil-environmentalist. The mixing, hopefully, makes it less likely that the dangerously ignorant anti-capitalist ideas get traction. Even if Occupiers are not close to understanding this, their typical ideas would make any open-access order country regress into limited-access order. Democracy and capitalism needs each other.

Right, anything too expensive won't happen. And that's when you need to use some kind of objective metric to decide whether you can run the plant anyway.

If a nuclear plant has a probability of core damage of 1e-5 per reactor year, should we decommission it and build a new plant with 1e-7 probability? 100 times better is a lot, right? But if a core damage costs on average $100 billion, then the 1e-5 probability averages $1 million in disaster costs per year, and it's probably not worth it to decommission the plant and build a plant that will only average $10,000 per year. And it's DEFINITELY not worth it to decommission THAT plant and go for an even newer 1e-9 plant at $100/year in core damage costs. Somewhere, it just becomes good enough and it would be, in fact, irresponsible to add more safety (instead of going for extra road safety or something).

So where are we at? To my mind, we're quite good if we implement the cheapest lessons from Fukushima.

How long does it take to debug a new "state-of-the-art" design? I am pro-nuclear and would like to see new innovative designs, but I still trust a mass-produced reactor with 30 years of proven operation (and with any design flaws found during those years mitigated) to run safely for another 10 or 20 years more than I trust a new design to run safely its first 10-20 years. I agree we should probably let go of the earliest designs, but gen2+ is good enough.

You have stereotypically repeated your misrepresentation of my stance more than a dozen times. With your other post, you're up to at least 22 claims of me being a "liar" in total, and you're adding up to a (not so) respectable number of variations on "stupid" too. I'm beginning to feel bad, actually. Whether your disorder is obsessive-compulsive, narcissistic, borderline or something else I can't say, but nothing good can come from me agitating it. I'm out of here.

Enough is known about nutrition to take a reductionist stand on this matter. Do you think your body need veggies, or do you think it need the fibers and micronutrients that some veggies are abundant sources of? Moderately intelligent and knowledgeable people should be aware of the implicit basics of the WHO text. I'm sorry your school failed to provide you with these tools.

I can only assume that the reason you keep pounding on your original misinterpretation is the fact that you cannot defend your original claim (that poor people need to eat bad food because they can't afford anything else) against my real stance. I've provided, as a counterexample, a cheap base diet that covers macronutrient needs, fibers and most micronutrients. It needs little variation to cover any micronutrient deficiencies. This diet is based on rice, whereas your examples had a nutritionally inferior potato/wheat base.

Btw, that's 3 more "liar", now we're at 20.

Again, you prove my point. Do you know how many times you have said I lie or called me liar? I counted to 17, but I probably missed some. You should seek help, both for you obsessive behaviour and for your sadistic streak (not that I hurt much, but anyway). And you should read up on nutrition.

I provided a citation earlier, but your "pretend ostrich" tactic makes you unable to acknowledge it. Btw, there ain't no such thing as "deficient in vegetables". You're looking ever-more ignorant.

It's a bit funny/sad to see how violently you react when exposed as a liar. And even sadder to see you talk about MY pride. You should see yourself.

A diet based on brown rice is quite superior to potato based and wheat based diets - that much should be clear even to you. And you have already looked at deficiencies in rice based societies, and I guess you've stumbled across stuff like this pubmed citation that gives indirect support: There are a few prevalent micronutrient deficiencies in poor rice based societies, and China and others are looking into fortified variants of rice to mitigate that. Another trivial possibility (at least in urban settings), is adding a few cheap complementary foods (and/or a multivitamin) that close the gaps.

I've made clear that I can present the numbers I've collected, but you reject that and demand proof by appeal to authority on the exact base diet example I provided, and I won't even bother to look for that. So we're stuck with your obsessive lies and abusive tantrums, aren't we?

I guess I was a bit too polite and subtle when I pointed out your references were irrelevant. My bad.