Why is the taxpayer the one that it's supposed to pay for Yucca Mountain? Why a "gift" to the nuclear industry, even if they really need it?
Where I king I would issue a statute that said:
1. The nuclear industry must, at their cost, arrange and pay for permanent disposal of waste fuel and other radioactive waste.
2. In my kingly benevolence I order that this disposal be done in Yucca Mountain, NV, and hereby forbid any and all third party opposition to the project
3. Notwithstanding 2. above, Yucca Mountain's Enviromental Plan must satisfy the Royal Environmental Protection Agency. The nuclear industry will comply with all Royal EPA requests.
Do you think the nuclear industry would be happy with Clause 1.? Absorbing the full cost of disposing the waste? I don't think they would ever accept it because it would make nuclear power uncompetitive.
Because a class-based solution will catch up poor blacks, poor whites, poor hispanics. It should have a disparate effect if more black than white people are poor, but that's a feature, not a bug.
At the end of the day, race based preferences are problematic and perhaps unconstitutional. They will be over at some point, for sure before the time when they are no longer needed. A class based solution is not constitutionally suspect, and is politically more palatable because there is no US vs THEM
I appreciate your comment on nuclear load following capabilities. Nuclear is the only generation technology I haven't worked with.
Having said that my main concern with nuclear is that I haven't seen any nuclear plant that fully internalizes the TOTAL cost of used fuel disposition. As far as I know used nuclear fuel, at least in the USA, is stored on site or in temporary facilities waiting for the day when the USA taxpayer will fund final disposition, a day that it is further away today than in 2008.
At least in the case of EDF the French taxpayer reaps the benefits of running the plant and covers the cost of the eventual fuel disposal, but Excelon will never be able to dispose of their radioactive waste. That's a massive (at this time intergenerational) subsidy to nuclear that I never see reflected in the economics of the technology.
I actually have a lot of faith in tide power, and I'm in awe at the drop of solar, that has broken the 40$/MWh barrier already w/o subsidies (only in prime sites obviously)
From a dispatch point of view (ignoring a lot of other considerations of cost and environmental problems) nuclear is very ill-fitted to a generation matrix that includes a lot of intermittent renewables. It is also very difficult to scale down in size to accommodate mid and small sized systems.
Gas Fired generation can bridge your gap faster and more cheaply
You cannot force cultural change. You can only foster policies that will flow though the system creating cultural change over the long run.
Race and crime are correlated HERE, NOW. That doesn't tell us anything about the individual person. To break that correlation will take decades. As Theodore Roosvelt probably didn't say "If this project will take a hundred years to complete, we must then start right now"
Race based affirmative action in job interviews, for example, would mean mandating by law that people called Shawanda or Latoffe be called for job interviews at twice the rate of those called Marys or Cristinas or Soo Ming. A class based AA would require that people, for instance, with a zip code in the 25% percentile be called for job interviews at twice the rate of those with zip codes in the 75% percentile.
Roberts is right in a sort of useless way, useless because he doesn't give us a road map to get from here to there, except "Stop doing this right now!".
Affirmative Action and Racial Preferences are a very blunt tool (for instance, lumping together deep South blacks with traditionally more successful Afro Caribbeans), and carry with them some undesirable side effects.
I would replace race based policies with class based policies, which would capture most of the people AA is trying to target while allowing the country to start phasing out positive race discrimination, and helping the new left-behind white underclass. Other alternatives exist, like the Top 10% of every single high school preference in the UT system that Texas enacted many years ago.
100 years of racist policies still have effects in our culture. Those effects are probably less every day, but they are still there, and will be for us for quite some time
To say that crime and race have a correlation HERE, TODAY, is data
To say that it is at least plausible that policies that were in place for 80 years even though they are no longer in place might have a causal effect, is a hypothesis worthy of study.
To say that the effect of policy changes and societal attitudes flow instantaneously across society, and therefore, the moment Civil Rights Laws were enacted, all races in America were now subject to the same societal conditions and the only remaining difference between people is melanin, is ignorance about history, culture, and society.
To say that melanin deficiency IN ITSELF causes virtuous behaviour, and thus the more melanin, the less virtuous, irrespective of any other elements, is racism.
On a separate subject. There is a good correlation between growing up bilingual and being able to pick up a third or fourth language later in life.
My mother learned her second language at 4, her third at 12, her fourth in her late 20s, and she is still now fully fluent in all four. I grew up bilingual, picked my third at 8, my fourth in my teens and my fifth in my 40s
I used to travel a lot to Turkey (five-six times a year), and after a couple of trips i was able to pick up about 20% of what was written in short texts I saw in the street.
So software that picks up kids growing up bilingual is actually picking up good candidates for a languages intensive school. These kids are good candidates for a third language.
Isn't there here a confusion between "Reality" and "Causes of that Reality"?
Reality is that in 2016's USA race is highly correlated with criminality. Any statistical analysis -in the USA in 2016- that doesn't show that correlation is suspect. If you tweak your model so that the correlation disappears you are not doing science, or public service, or whatever it is you wanted to do. At best, you are lying to yourself. At worst, you are being devious.
But knowing that race and criminality are correlated tells me nothing about why. To assume that it is because the genes for criminality are the same genes as melanin production is stupid. We need to recognize the existence of the correlation, and to try to figure out the causation (most likely related to racist policies from years and decades past, still flushing their effect through the system, even if those policies are no longer in place), aiming to revert that correlation.
Data is data. Replacing good data with bad data in the name of political correctness is the same as rejecting that sexual orientation is innate in the name of telos or God or something.
Is there a place or webpage(s) where I can find out what shows are carried by whom, on a per show basis, so I can see if I need Netflix plus Hulu plus Prime, or if I am good with only one.
I hate, hate, hate paying for ESPN and CNN and a lot of their companions, but I do like Top Chef :-), Amazing Race and Les Revenants
This is not an accurate description because the A-->B implies (pun intended) that B only depends on A, and that if A, then B will necessarily come about, ignoring that reality is a multivariable, chaotic, system
For instance, the Santorum's of the world's slippery slope is that gay marriage will bring forth people marrying farm animals.
In reality, gay marriage only affected the partial derivative of marriage with respect to sex, so the only implication is that, if people's marriage to farm animals come to pass, a man will be able to marry a cow or a bull, a stallion or a mare.
But gay marriage did not affect the partial derivative of marriage with respect to species, or the partial derivative of marriage with respect to consent, or the partial derivative of marriage with respect to mental capability, or the partial derivative of marriage with respect to age (can I marry a calf if I can marry a bull?), or the partial derivative of marriage with respect to number (so, so far, I cannot marry a bull AND a cow even if I am bisexual). Viewed like this, gay marriage has not moved us at all towards marrying farm animals.
The A implies B: B implies C, etc. argument is a fallacy when you try to move it from a series of singularly dependent functions to a multivariable environment.
i was planning to skip commenting on this post because there was nothing i could say that would improve on what Tod wrote, and it's a subject I'm a bit touchy about.
It's a stupid, unneeded law. Tolling.
But at the end, I felt we were missing a little bit of defending the words "Blue Lives Matter"
I am a supporter of Blue Lives Matter. I have been committed for a long time to a charity that helps widows and families of policemen (and other first responders) that died in the course of duty. I have paid respects to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington.
I don't have any relatives in Law Enforcement. I do this because I am in awe that some people are willing to consider a career in which dying to protect others is a non trivial likelihood. It's a sacrifice I cannot even fathom. So I try to give back some to the families of those that made it.
And yes this law is plain and simple trolling. To me, it demeans what Blue Lives Matter means. And I'm not a happy bunny for it. An Anticop Hate Crime Law is stupid, and trolling, and solves no existing problem.
Yes, police brutality is a thing that should be reined in. Fast. Swiftly. It's hurting our society. It plants divisions between the police and those they swore to protect. It corrupts. And it corrupts black officers as much as it corrupts white officers, because they all carry the blue veneer on top. It sickens me.
But, nevertheless, every day I am thankful of the Thin Blue Line, and those that are out there, building it, in exchange, by the way, for very shitty pay.
There's probably ore black ops than even you might believe- but most of it is on the margins. Expensive yes, but not earth moving.
Taking out Bin Laden was black ops brought to light, but how much are we reshaping the world one black op at a time?
The problem with black ops is that they are as good as the politician/civil servant sitting in Washington. And the amount that these guys know about the world is painfully little.
How many people around here know what the Inner Niger Delta is and why is important (no googling)? There's a sixpack of IPAs that says that the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee has no clue where it is (hint: not in Nigeria) though I'm sure that it has appeared in the intelligence reports he is supposed to read at least once a month.
I have a lot of respect for the guys doing back ops in the field. And I pity that they are controlled by people that do not understand the difference between a Shia and a Sunni.
If intervention is only military intervention and chairing diplomatic meetings is not intervening, then like 75% of our formal intervention in Syria just poofed into thin air, which makes the Ds even less intervening than what I thought.
There is a vast ocean of difference between sending some weapons and chairing some diplomatic meetings, and having 20,000 US troops like McCain was requesting last November.
It was not Hillary who wanted to find out if radioactive sand glowed in the dark
I'm not sure I follow your point, but the first McCain and Syria hit in Google is from Nov 29 2015, not yet six months ago, McCain asking for 20,000 ground troops to be sent to Syria. So, whatever the change is, it must be fishing recent
As far as I know, the difference between the Rs and the Ds on the Ukraine, Syria, and Libya, is that the Rs have favored more intervention, more armed support to the "good" guys and boots in the ground. This site gets iffy with too many links, but google John McCain and Ukraine, John McCain and Syria, and John McCain and Libya.
Before someone says "well, that's McCain's personal opinion", do remember that the Republican Party chose the Senator from AZ as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I doubt that was because McCain's opinions were SO OUT OF WHACK with the Party Leadership's that it made all the sense to have him chair a Committee that has REALLY NOTHING TO DO with military interventions
I am not sure I understand your comment, but I shudder at anything that has the word Ideal in front.
Ideal sounds like a Platonic Form. It goes back to people that know Truth (with capital T). And because they know the true Truth, mere facts on the ground are irrelevant.
If the facts contradict Truth, too bad for the facts.
So whatever the ideal communal is, i don't want any part of it.
In actual practice, the DeBeers of the world are rare cases (1970s OPEC could be another, if you ignore that the members were themselves governments)
The rise of DeBeers has also a lot to do with the specific politics of the British Empire and of South Africa. In a different political environment (for instance a Civil Code legal structure) De Beers would be very different or not at all
Everybody is a lot of people. It only takes "one" to invalidate "Everybody"
Because mankind evolved -most likely- as a social and hierarchical animal, and because civilization is a communal effort, most humans actually need a social structure and a coordinating mechanism
DeBeers is a very particular case, because they control a very large percentage of a very valuable commodity. Thus they have true Power (if nothing else Power in the Paul Muad'dib sense, the power to destroy a thing (or in this case withhold production and trade) is the absolute control over it
Of course, they do so at the pleasure of the South African government (or the South African, Namibian, and Botswanan governments, if you prefer)
DeBeers is large and powerful enough that they can also influence said governments, and undoubtedly do so, subject to the Mandate of Heaven. The day enough South African, Namibian, and Botswanans consider that DeBeers is a pox on those countries, kicking DeBeers out will be a matter of weeks.
Far from me to say that those countries will be better without DeBeers. I actually believe the opposite, that if DeBeers is kicked out the countries will suffer massively. The Mandate from Heaven is far from being always right (because it's not really from Heaven)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Tech Linkage”
Why is the taxpayer the one that it's supposed to pay for Yucca Mountain? Why a "gift" to the nuclear industry, even if they really need it?
Where I king I would issue a statute that said:
1. The nuclear industry must, at their cost, arrange and pay for permanent disposal of waste fuel and other radioactive waste.
2. In my kingly benevolence I order that this disposal be done in Yucca Mountain, NV, and hereby forbid any and all third party opposition to the project
3. Notwithstanding 2. above, Yucca Mountain's Enviromental Plan must satisfy the Royal Environmental Protection Agency. The nuclear industry will comply with all Royal EPA requests.
Do you think the nuclear industry would be happy with Clause 1.? Absorbing the full cost of disposing the waste? I don't think they would ever accept it because it would make nuclear power uncompetitive.
"
This is like 5 years old info, but wind class cat IV sites were profitable at 85 $/MWh all-in.
I haven't seen data for higher class sites and offshore wind and I wonder where the prices are now
On “How that Machine Algorithm Ended up being Racist”
Because a class-based solution will catch up poor blacks, poor whites, poor hispanics. It should have a disparate effect if more black than white people are poor, but that's a feature, not a bug.
At the end of the day, race based preferences are problematic and perhaps unconstitutional. They will be over at some point, for sure before the time when they are no longer needed. A class based solution is not constitutionally suspect, and is politically more palatable because there is no US vs THEM
On “Tech Linkage”
I appreciate your comment on nuclear load following capabilities. Nuclear is the only generation technology I haven't worked with.
Having said that my main concern with nuclear is that I haven't seen any nuclear plant that fully internalizes the TOTAL cost of used fuel disposition. As far as I know used nuclear fuel, at least in the USA, is stored on site or in temporary facilities waiting for the day when the USA taxpayer will fund final disposition, a day that it is further away today than in 2008.
At least in the case of EDF the French taxpayer reaps the benefits of running the plant and covers the cost of the eventual fuel disposal, but Excelon will never be able to dispose of their radioactive waste. That's a massive (at this time intergenerational) subsidy to nuclear that I never see reflected in the economics of the technology.
I actually have a lot of faith in tide power, and I'm in awe at the drop of solar, that has broken the 40$/MWh barrier already w/o subsidies (only in prime sites obviously)
On “How that Machine Algorithm Ended up being Racist”
if you move into a bad zipcode to improve your kid's chance for college you are a gentrifyer.
And I have a lot of nice things to say about gentrifying, since I live in a gentrified neighbourhood myself
On “Tech Linkage”
Why do you think we need nuclear at all?
From a dispatch point of view (ignoring a lot of other considerations of cost and environmental problems) nuclear is very ill-fitted to a generation matrix that includes a lot of intermittent renewables. It is also very difficult to scale down in size to accommodate mid and small sized systems.
Gas Fired generation can bridge your gap faster and more cheaply
On “How that Machine Algorithm Ended up being Racist”
You cannot force cultural change. You can only foster policies that will flow though the system creating cultural change over the long run.
Race and crime are correlated HERE, NOW. That doesn't tell us anything about the individual person. To break that correlation will take decades. As Theodore Roosvelt probably didn't say "If this project will take a hundred years to complete, we must then start right now"
Race based affirmative action in job interviews, for example, would mean mandating by law that people called Shawanda or Latoffe be called for job interviews at twice the rate of those called Marys or Cristinas or Soo Ming. A class based AA would require that people, for instance, with a zip code in the 25% percentile be called for job interviews at twice the rate of those with zip codes in the 75% percentile.
"
Roberts is right in a sort of useless way, useless because he doesn't give us a road map to get from here to there, except "Stop doing this right now!".
Affirmative Action and Racial Preferences are a very blunt tool (for instance, lumping together deep South blacks with traditionally more successful Afro Caribbeans), and carry with them some undesirable side effects.
I would replace race based policies with class based policies, which would capture most of the people AA is trying to target while allowing the country to start phasing out positive race discrimination, and helping the new left-behind white underclass. Other alternatives exist, like the Top 10% of every single high school preference in the UT system that Texas enacted many years ago.
100 years of racist policies still have effects in our culture. Those effects are probably less every day, but they are still there, and will be for us for quite some time
"
To say that crime and race have a correlation HERE, TODAY, is data
To say that it is at least plausible that policies that were in place for 80 years even though they are no longer in place might have a causal effect, is a hypothesis worthy of study.
To say that the effect of policy changes and societal attitudes flow instantaneously across society, and therefore, the moment Civil Rights Laws were enacted, all races in America were now subject to the same societal conditions and the only remaining difference between people is melanin, is ignorance about history, culture, and society.
To say that melanin deficiency IN ITSELF causes virtuous behaviour, and thus the more melanin, the less virtuous, irrespective of any other elements, is racism.
"
On a separate subject. There is a good correlation between growing up bilingual and being able to pick up a third or fourth language later in life.
My mother learned her second language at 4, her third at 12, her fourth in her late 20s, and she is still now fully fluent in all four. I grew up bilingual, picked my third at 8, my fourth in my teens and my fifth in my 40s
I used to travel a lot to Turkey (five-six times a year), and after a couple of trips i was able to pick up about 20% of what was written in short texts I saw in the street.
So software that picks up kids growing up bilingual is actually picking up good candidates for a languages intensive school. These kids are good candidates for a third language.
"
Isn't there here a confusion between "Reality" and "Causes of that Reality"?
Reality is that in 2016's USA race is highly correlated with criminality. Any statistical analysis -in the USA in 2016- that doesn't show that correlation is suspect. If you tweak your model so that the correlation disappears you are not doing science, or public service, or whatever it is you wanted to do. At best, you are lying to yourself. At worst, you are being devious.
But knowing that race and criminality are correlated tells me nothing about why. To assume that it is because the genes for criminality are the same genes as melanin production is stupid. We need to recognize the existence of the correlation, and to try to figure out the causation (most likely related to racist policies from years and decades past, still flushing their effect through the system, even if those policies are no longer in place), aiming to revert that correlation.
Data is data. Replacing good data with bad data in the name of political correctness is the same as rejecting that sexual orientation is innate in the name of telos or God or something.
On “The Oncoming Baseball Financial Apocalypse”
This is more like a bleg.
Is there a place or webpage(s) where I can find out what shows are carried by whom, on a per show basis, so I can see if I need Netflix plus Hulu plus Prime, or if I am good with only one.
I hate, hate, hate paying for ESPN and CNN and a lot of their companions, but I do like Top Chef :-), Amazing Race and Les Revenants
On “The Blue Lives Matter Movement & the Inherent Trouble With (and Need for) Hate Crime Laws”
This is not an accurate description because the A-->B implies (pun intended) that B only depends on A, and that if A, then B will necessarily come about, ignoring that reality is a multivariable, chaotic, system
For instance, the Santorum's of the world's slippery slope is that gay marriage will bring forth people marrying farm animals.
In reality, gay marriage only affected the partial derivative of marriage with respect to sex, so the only implication is that, if people's marriage to farm animals come to pass, a man will be able to marry a cow or a bull, a stallion or a mare.
But gay marriage did not affect the partial derivative of marriage with respect to species, or the partial derivative of marriage with respect to consent, or the partial derivative of marriage with respect to mental capability, or the partial derivative of marriage with respect to age (can I marry a calf if I can marry a bull?), or the partial derivative of marriage with respect to number (so, so far, I cannot marry a bull AND a cow even if I am bisexual). Viewed like this, gay marriage has not moved us at all towards marrying farm animals.
The A implies B: B implies C, etc. argument is a fallacy when you try to move it from a series of singularly dependent functions to a multivariable environment.
"
i know
i was planning to skip commenting on this post because there was nothing i could say that would improve on what Tod wrote, and it's a subject I'm a bit touchy about.
It's a stupid, unneeded law. Tolling.
But at the end, I felt we were missing a little bit of defending the words "Blue Lives Matter"
"
I am a supporter of Blue Lives Matter. I have been committed for a long time to a charity that helps widows and families of policemen (and other first responders) that died in the course of duty. I have paid respects to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington.
I don't have any relatives in Law Enforcement. I do this because I am in awe that some people are willing to consider a career in which dying to protect others is a non trivial likelihood. It's a sacrifice I cannot even fathom. So I try to give back some to the families of those that made it.
And yes this law is plain and simple trolling. To me, it demeans what Blue Lives Matter means. And I'm not a happy bunny for it. An Anticop Hate Crime Law is stupid, and trolling, and solves no existing problem.
Yes, police brutality is a thing that should be reined in. Fast. Swiftly. It's hurting our society. It plants divisions between the police and those they swore to protect. It corrupts. And it corrupts black officers as much as it corrupts white officers, because they all carry the blue veneer on top. It sickens me.
But, nevertheless, every day I am thankful of the Thin Blue Line, and those that are out there, building it, in exchange, by the way, for very shitty pay.
Blue Lives Matter.
They do
Yes
On “The Libertarian Choice — A Dated Governor Or An Internet Troll”
There's probably ore black ops than even you might believe- but most of it is on the margins. Expensive yes, but not earth moving.
Taking out Bin Laden was black ops brought to light, but how much are we reshaping the world one black op at a time?
The problem with black ops is that they are as good as the politician/civil servant sitting in Washington. And the amount that these guys know about the world is painfully little.
How many people around here know what the Inner Niger Delta is and why is important (no googling)? There's a sixpack of IPAs that says that the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee has no clue where it is (hint: not in Nigeria) though I'm sure that it has appeared in the intelligence reports he is supposed to read at least once a month.
I have a lot of respect for the guys doing back ops in the field. And I pity that they are controlled by people that do not understand the difference between a Shia and a Sunni.
"
If intervention is only military intervention and chairing diplomatic meetings is not intervening, then like 75% of our formal intervention in Syria just poofed into thin air, which makes the Ds even less intervening than what I thought.
"
"....if she wins, there will be a world war three while she is in office."
...only after someone puts a gun on Chelsea's head....
"
I don't buy that.
There is a vast ocean of difference between sending some weapons and chairing some diplomatic meetings, and having 20,000 US troops like McCain was requesting last November.
It was not Hillary who wanted to find out if radioactive sand glowed in the dark
"
I'm not sure I follow your point, but the first McCain and Syria hit in Google is from Nov 29 2015, not yet six months ago, McCain asking for 20,000 ground troops to be sent to Syria. So, whatever the change is, it must be fishing recent
"
As far as I know, the difference between the Rs and the Ds on the Ukraine, Syria, and Libya, is that the Rs have favored more intervention, more armed support to the "good" guys and boots in the ground. This site gets iffy with too many links, but google John McCain and Ukraine, John McCain and Syria, and John McCain and Libya.
Before someone says "well, that's McCain's personal opinion", do remember that the Republican Party chose the Senator from AZ as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I doubt that was because McCain's opinions were SO OUT OF WHACK with the Party Leadership's that it made all the sense to have him chair a Committee that has REALLY NOTHING TO DO with military interventions
On “WTF Texas?”
I am not sure I understand your comment, but I shudder at anything that has the word Ideal in front.
Ideal sounds like a Platonic Form. It goes back to people that know Truth (with capital T). And because they know the true Truth, mere facts on the ground are irrelevant.
If the facts contradict Truth, too bad for the facts.
So whatever the ideal communal is, i don't want any part of it.
"
In principle I do not disagree with you.
In actual practice, the DeBeers of the world are rare cases (1970s OPEC could be another, if you ignore that the members were themselves governments)
The rise of DeBeers has also a lot to do with the specific politics of the British Empire and of South Africa. In a different political environment (for instance a Civil Code legal structure) De Beers would be very different or not at all
"
Everybody is a lot of people. It only takes "one" to invalidate "Everybody"
Because mankind evolved -most likely- as a social and hierarchical animal, and because civilization is a communal effort, most humans actually need a social structure and a coordinating mechanism
"
DeBeers is a very particular case, because they control a very large percentage of a very valuable commodity. Thus they have true Power (if nothing else Power in the Paul Muad'dib sense, the power to destroy a thing (or in this case withhold production and trade) is the absolute control over it
Of course, they do so at the pleasure of the South African government (or the South African, Namibian, and Botswanan governments, if you prefer)
DeBeers is large and powerful enough that they can also influence said governments, and undoubtedly do so, subject to the Mandate of Heaven. The day enough South African, Namibian, and Botswanans consider that DeBeers is a pox on those countries, kicking DeBeers out will be a matter of weeks.
Far from me to say that those countries will be better without DeBeers. I actually believe the opposite, that if DeBeers is kicked out the countries will suffer massively. The Mandate from Heaven is far from being always right (because it's not really from Heaven)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.