45 karma · joined June 4, 2016
My only recommendation would be to stay away from the local panix.* usenet hierarchy. They're frequented by intelligent but remarkably insular folk, and they could easily leave you with a rather poor impression of the service. Just ignore them.
While slightly clumsy wording on my side, I was trying to say exactly this while trying to encompass the able help of outside experts and agencies that all worked (and still work) to contain this disaster.
>Which is why the danger - even at Chernobyl - is usually severely overstated.
Perhaps by others, but not by me. I was simply saying that the disaster area is still and will likely long remain an unlivable place. I find that an unacceptable risk. You are welcome to disagree.
>Fear tends to suppress rationality, so remember to stick to the facts, and remember that reputable sources can be hard to find for any topic.
This goes both ways. Arguing from the standpoint of reactor designs we're not using and setting arbitrary thresholds for "huge" versus "insane" to decide what's really worthy of our concern and using "modern medicine" as a catchall for improved chances for survival as if it were a solved problem aren't good talking points. The variation in survivorship among the liquidators has as much to do with how much exposure they had working on site. Most of those with larger exposures aren't fighting for healthcare--they're already dead.
Besides, this all stemmed from my original reply about whether there was any evidence for the disaster costing more than one generation. I'll "stick to the facts" by saying it did, it does, and even the very battle against Russian beaucracy for healthcare coverage you mentioned shows that even the care of survivors remain an issue for later generations.
Yes, it would be hypocritical if that's what I was doing. Except, instead, I was simply submitting what I felt was an important concern with nuclear energy. Similarly, it's disingenuous to talk of breeder reactor designs and their "tiny" amounts of waste when these remain mostly experimental and undeployed. The original links you posted for some other environmental disasters are very real, otoh.
No matter, I'm not sure why we're comparing Chernobyl against these and other environmental disasters when they should be lumped together--these are all sins of our species.
Without sounding like I'm belittling the scale of that disaster, I still think of flood recovery as being relatively "short term" (a decade or two) compared to the aftermath of a nuclear meltdown (decades, possibly hundreds of years). That Chernobyl wasn't(/isn't) a bigger problem is partly due to reasonably effective intervention by an international team. The potential here is frightening enough that I don't think we should need high body counts to weigh the consequences.
(Addendum: And, yes, a good amount of money is still being spent to keep this disaster contained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_New_Safe_Confinement)
But a mistake doesn't cost one generation, it costs many. The odds for an incident are supposed to be ridiculously low, yet I've seen two catastrophic meltdowns just in my lifetime. I don't feel any energy need is worth even risking the rightful inheritance of so many descendants, ...
Back on topic, ...
Golden Eagles are generally sparse breeders with some of the largest home territories of any bird. A successful pair typically produces one or two chicks. As many as 55-70% of successfully reared offspring don't live through their third year. It takes birds typically six or seven years to reach full maturity, although breeding is possible by their fourth or even third year of life--however, young parents are rarely successful ones.
The point I'm making is that this is not a species with overwhelming numbers, nor the ability to recover readily from steady declines. This is especially true when you speak of Golden Eagle populations typically in terms of hundreds or thousands of pairs (not tens or hundreds of thousands as you might with some more common songbird species). The steady "take" of even just a few percent of the GE population each year should not be conflated as having the same impact to the population as plinking house sparrows with a pellet gun.
(Edit for typos and clarity.)
But, seriously, I see too many bad faith owners/operators who really don't give a shit about their effects on wildlife. And I see regulators setting a low bar and showing no teeth when it actually matters. Altamont Pass is a prime example--despite knowing about the "bird problem" there for many years, there has never been a requirement by state or federal regulators for any sort of mitigation at all. I find that honestly a bit disgusting.
Even the Eagle Take Permit's primary tool of "compensatory mitigation" (usually in the form of utility pole retrofitting) does not address where the problem actually occurs. You don't balance wildlife populations like you would an algebra equation--instead, the side subtracted from is simply subtracted, even if you conceivably enable gains elsewhere.
> Turbines almost never kill bald eagles.
Better to attribute the ramping of Bald Eagle populations across North America to the ban of DDT and other organochlorines, as well as successful restorative nest hacking in areas where they were extirpated. Windfarms are simply not common enough to be a mitigating factor (yet).
> Golden eagle fatalities are relatively uncommon at wind projects.
This is a clever turn of phrase. One could also say wind projects are also relatively uncommon, which is probably the biggest reason there haven’t been more eagle fatalities. One need to look no further than Altamont Pass, California, to see what happens when you install a windfarm adjacent to the largest known population of nesting Golden Eagle in the world. That's a worst case scenario, of course. But the point is that good siting is pretty much the key to making bird killing a non-problem. As more windfarms are installed, the problem will likely become more common.
With that said, state and federal regulators in the USA have either by omission or intent set very low bars for “voluntary reporting” and mortality monitoring. The lion’s share of the mortality data that exists is strictly “proprietary”, and has never been shared. And most windfarms do practically no monitoring at all apart from the laughingly inadequate pre-construction and post-construction surveys mandated by the USFWS. And why should they? The hostile legal environment surrounding permitting, for example, would make it foolhardy for any company to go out of their way to collect data that could only become a giant liability down the line. Simply put, the absence of data for eagle mortality should not be taken as a sign that there is no eagle mortality occurring.
> The majority of golden eagle deaths occur at older wind farms build in the 1980s, when the relationship between turbines and eagles was not understood. Better-sited, modern turbines are replacing outdated ones and lowering deaths by 80 percent.
They are referring to Altamont Pass, again. Modern turbines are definitely better. Rather than the picket-line or gauntlet of high-speed blenders installed atop hills where birds slope-soar and hunt, modern turbines tend to be spaced much farther apart, greatly reducing the likelihood of a collision. However, reducing incidence of collision does not mean “lowering deaths”--it just means that that each “pass” an eagle makes through a windfarm becomes less dangerous. This distinction is important. In windfarms where choice prey is abundant, hunting eagles will typically make several extended passes through a windfarm each day, making their likelihood of an “encounter” with a turbine quite high over a period of several days or weeks.
They say “lowering deaths by 80 percent”, then backpedal a bit farther down:
> It is estimated that eagle fatalities will be reduced by as much as 80% as those long-standing wind sites replace their shorter, more numerous, faster-rotating old turbines with taller, less numerous, slower-rotating modern turbines that are sited based on more experience.
I was about to say: the only windfarm in the country that’s employed any serious “repowering” effort is Altamont Pass. And the speculated improvement that new turbines are better than the old turbines for “lowering deaths” there has, so far, been inconclusive. It’s not that modern turbines aren’t an improvement, it’s just that this webpage doesn’t yet have any justification to be making this claim!
> Modern turbines have slower-rotating blades, and fewer are needed to generate the same amount of electricity.
Modern turbines’ rate of rotation is indeed slower, but the speeds of the actual blades (especially on the distal half) is actually appreciably faster than smaller bird blenders. In practice, it just means the risk is harder to model, since birds can at times ably pass through the relatively slow rotating part of the blade path near the nacelle but be likely to be literally sliced in two if attempting the same manoeuvrer more toward the end of the blade.
> It also seeks scientifically credible ways to lower and mitigate wind energy’s impacts.
Translation, wind companies are trying to dig up some legit-sounding research on the cheap that backs up what they say. With very few exceptions, the business of wind energy is incompatible with properly funding the research on its impacts. This slack is left to underfunded academics and conservationists, not companies built for the purpose of profit.
> Developers thoroughly evaluate risk to eagles before projects are sited and built. Developers make adjustment to wind farm design, turbine locations and project operations to reduce potential impacts. They abandon the riskiest sites in order to avoid significant impacts.
This is basically BS. It wasn’t until the Duke Energy settlement over its WY wind projects that wind companies starting taking this much more seriously. Ten years ago, it was more normal to find an environmental consulting group who’d be willing to game the EIA and pre- and post-contructions surveys to help you through the federal site permitting process.
> If the risk for eagle collision is high, operators are often required to continuously monitor for any impacts on eagles and mitigate for them should they occur.
This is BS. Under “voluntary reporting” guidelines, who’s to even know? It’s only very recently that regulators have imposed any sorts of requirements like this.
> These permits are similar to take permits available under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which is the gold standard for wildlife protection.
They are not so similar at all, with the sole exception that permit issuance smacks more of capriciousness by regulators than helping mankind find a sound(er) balance between wildlife and the needs of man.
I could go on, but why bother? This is just a dumb PR page ...
What I do see as a big problem is cost. Government subsidies aside, the cost of buying and installing turbines presently is no laughing matter. At scale, solar is rapidly becoming much cheaper to install than wind, which is increasingly becoming reliant on giant 3-5 MW capacity monoliths costing roughly 4-5 million USD a pop--not accounting for installation and maintenance over the long term, and supporting infrastructure and transmission lines to tie the windfarm into The Grid.
What's actually true is that "house cats" and wind turbines can be fairly effective killers in their respective niche. Cats predate primarily songbird species. Wind turbines whack relatively low-abundance birds of prey and--in offshore installations--seabirds. With the right circumstances, both can do very substantial harm to bird populations.
But for me, the upside to this story is knowing that it is still fully possible to disappear in these places, which makes me all the more convinced these lands are worth protecting. For many, the subconscious draw of truly wild places is often that how they stand in sure counterpoint to the modality our society has adopted (i.e., so many people go the wilderness to "get away" or keep their mind off things.) Not every square inch of this world needs to be made friendly to humans, though, but I don't think everyone wants to fully accept that even if they normally pay lip service to conservation principles and the important of our national parks and wildlife refuges. So excuse me if I come across as callous, but if people don't bring their phones or come in the least prepared for their "walk in the woods," I'm not sure I quite see a problem that society needs to bend over backwards to solve.
While most people aren't rich, there is certainly enough wealth among the HN readership, as evidenced by their interest in Apple products, high-end smartphones, DSLRs, Teslas, etc. And even if people couldn't afford to get a workstation, they could have still donated to the cause. That this didn't happen says to me that enough people honestly just didn't give a damn. This comes off as very strange to me, because people are clearly outraged by the conduct of MS, Intel, and others. Buying a Talos means a chance to start stripping some of the usual antagonists in this saga of their hegemony on the computing community at large. Personally, I'd be willing to live with more expensive computers in the short-term if it meant a check on their influence in the long-term.
And performance-wise, Talos with an unclocked 8 core 190 watt POWER8 promised a bit better than the i7-5960X workstation I use at home (not a $400 chip), and consumed only modestly more power than same. So that doesn't strike me as a strong argument against it. But if the only reason this product would appeal to people is that it needed to offer equivalent performance to its x86 counterparts at roughly equiv prices, then we're in dire straits--that misses the entire point of having a computer that guarantees your access right down to the hardware and firmware. Until now, we've only enjoyed this luxury on small embedded boards (e.g., BeagleBone), which are toys in comparison.
Finally, RISC-V may be promising, but it's not here--POWER8 is, and POWER9 is already in the works. Why hold your breath for what may prove to be vaporware apart from prototypes in an academic or company R&D setting?
But I'll admit I presently have little faith these will take off. It seems like the folks who should know enough to care about these efforts don't. At least not enough to support them. HN articles like "I returned my 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar" garner hundreds of upvotes and comments within hours of posting even weeks after this horse was beaten to an unrecognizable pulp on HN following the Apple announcement. And don't forget the hunt for a new "development laptop" (translation: a MacBook Pro-like laptop not made by Apple that somehow doesn't sacrifice any of the trendy/cool and usual dog tricks we've all grown accustomed to having in Apple's products) that also keeps coming up. Talos receives ... crickets chirping. What does this say about the state of our industry where even the tech literates of HN are barely distinguishable in their buying behaviour from the general consumer? It's almost like many of the folks here don't even see vendor lock-down as an actual problem, or at least don't give truly libre computing platforms more than a passing thought even when actual opportunities to produce them emerge.
I won't suggest the article's complaints are baseless, however, even if the article itself reflects the poor community journalism I remember expecting from the Post-Standard. Because even if Verizon isn't falsifying usage data for users, the whole game is partly rigged! A typical user has no idea what their actual usage is, or what their devices do automagically in their absence. I've seen 10 GB prepaid cell data allowances get liquidated the very evening of the day they were topped off by project volunteers using laptops. In one case, a user checking and writing email forgot to disable Windows Updates. In another instance, the user had no concept of how large the neat videos he uploaded to the project's FB page actually were. Without a real concept of how much data they actually use, most users will end up finding a data plan mostly by trial & error--they will go as cheap as they can, and incrementally adjust to a larger plan when they "go over" (rinse & repeat). I think of the numerous uncomfortable talks and arguments in households everywhere based on stupid ideas of what constitutes data use, and parents who are no better informed than their children about what they can do to actually reduce household data usage.
And yes, turning off automatic updates, "wifi assist", and other settings is good advice. Except that many of these settings have a mysterious way of getting re-enabled in commercial OSes. Why is it necessary for users to constantly police their own device settings because the Apples, Microsofts, and Googles of the world have other ideas? If you're running a non-libre OS (which is unavoidable on smart phones, presently), you might as well expect some hardship here. Your device does what it wants, because its makers don't think it actually belongs to you.
I suspect that the main reason my experience with Verizon Wireless has been nearly painless (if not inexpensive) is because I keep only a dumb phone and several machines installed with Slackware. My data usage may be larger some months, but I always know why! It's never a surprise.
I think the initial struggle will be getting used to an RPN calculator if you've never used one before. (Some of them are a bit idiosyncratic.) But RPN notation itself is probably closer to how you actually solve many problems on paper. Long division is a good example.
In most modern "algebraic" calculators, the style often encouraged is to key in complete equations chock full of parens and notation (often represented graphically) from left to right with the expectation that calculator is smart enough to do the right thing when given your input values and the crank is turned (push ENTER). But there are sometimes surprising evaluation order gotchas even between different calculator models, even those made by the same manufacturer!
RPN is somewhat more rudimentary, making the user generally responsible for the order of evaluation by solving equations piecemeal. But as a result, you are rewarded with more consistency, fewer WTF moments with unexpected answers (since you're typically calculating intermediate values as you go), fewer keystrokes needed for solving most problems you'd typically use a handheld calculator for nowadays, intermediate values that can be efficiently (re)used on the stack as many times as needed (removing most of the need for additional registers), is more intuitive for making very compact and memory efficient algorithms (not the perk it was back in the day, arguably), and a keystroke programming model that closely corresponds to the way a user normally solves problems with the calculator manually. A simple but effective demonstration of the above features is solving a polynomial with an RPN calculator and a typical TI.
So I'd say difficult mathematics will remain difficult. But the analogy that comes to my mind would be the difference for the driver of an automatic transmission versus a manual transmission. Or a black box that does too much, leaving the user unsure of the full breadth of its function. RPN prevents the user from becoming too distant from what (s)he is calculating, while still providing all the power and abstraction needed not to be bogged down (too much) by the mechanics of the calculation itself.