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Thorium isn't rare. You probably have enough in your lawn to supply your lifetime energy needs. Also, it's a waste product of rare earths mining, and there's a United States stockpile of 3.2 million kg of thorium nitrate that nobody knows what to do with.

Westinghouse's business model was to try to break even on construction and make money servicing and selling fuel rod assemblies.

That doesn't necessarily make the father biased/racist; but I think you're right about the economic incentives at play. Many of the problems I've encountered with Chinese manufacturing can be traced back to stateside managers/purchasers wanting to relentlessly drive the price down, yet still exert the same kind of QC effort (or less) than they did with their former in-house manufacturing. They (mgmt) failed to recognize a lot of informal QC that might otherwise be lumped in with "work-ethic." They also probably laid off the experienced QC and put a jr level engineer/recent grad "in charge", but with little/no authority to do anything. Meanwhile on the Chinese side, the workers work hard, usually with every effort focused on speed. I remember one specific case where an assembler kept ruining chassis because they wouldn't replace worn screwdrivers for the assemblers. They caused lots of rework simply because the Chinese shop manager was too tight to accept that screwdrivers are consumables.

tl;dr Don't rush to blame the workers, they're usually just doing what they've been told to do.

Relevant Gladwell criticism: http://www.martinottaway.com/blog/rik-van-hemmen/forensic-en...

If the manufacturing jobs come back, they're bringing developing-nation-style quality of life with them. POTUS can't do anything other than protectionism, and that will only stave off disaster, while driving quality to the floor.

I don't know. We're not alone though, the UK is further down this road than we are.

Yes, I agree that the oil has a major role as well.

As far as water pumps go, I've noticed that they often have alloy impellers now, and used to have stamped steel ones. I've heard of people rebuilding water pumps themselves (as opposed to buying a remanufactured unit), but never seen that done except in special cases (large stationary engine, rare obsolete engine).

The only thing I'm unhappy with about our Miele dishwasher is that I was told if I installed it myself, that Miele wouldn't honor the warranty. We're kind rural, and there's no local Miele dealer. I almost bought another brand instead.

Ours is super quiet. I wish it hadn't cost so much, but I can't say I regret it.

That's easy to see if you're replacing an older model with a HE unit. The case is not so obvious when replacing a recent model HE unit with a newer HE one.

I have to disagree with this premise as it pertains to automobile engines. Automobile engines have improved tremendously in "lifespan" or Time Before OverHaul. In the '70's and '80's it was a challenge to get an engine to last 100,000 miles. They needed frequent oil changes, spark plugs replaced, had other short-life wearable parts (ignition parts), water pumps to replace, fuel pumps to replace, alternators went bad, oil leaks (rope seal packing), etc. In the early '90's some real improvements began to become apparent. Now cars routinely make it past 100,000 mi without replacing any of that stuff, and while producing more power per unit of displacement.

Miele is the brand of dishwasher for you. They are expensive, and not perfect, but it will slowly and reliably get the dishes clean. The best part is that it never makes a peep, this thing is super-quiet. The worst thing is: no child control-lock (you try and get a curious toddler to disregard it for hours).

>c) they didn't have any modern electronics. All failures were mechanical, while today they are electronic (and usually non-reparable, only replaceable).

I used to worry about this, but we bought a high efficiency front loader anyway. After 4 years we've replaced: Door gasket - ~$80, and Pump - ~$50. Once, the front control panel started misbehaving and I thought for sure the machine was done for. But I looked and found that a wire harness had worked its way loose, and one of the wires was rubbed almost in two. I repaired the wire and the machine returned to normal. My opinion is that parts are generally available, and that these machines are as simple to repair as any older machine.

Maybe they ticked the best option with the least friction (not sure what license terms are even available at YT).

I asked, and they responded with this:

>Copyright and Reuse

    Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory grants certain permissions to reuse content created by Lawrence Livermore. These permissions are governed by Creative Commons copyright license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (link is external), more commonly referred to as "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike." Under this license, Lawrence Livermore permits others to remix, tweak and build upon original works created by Lawrence Livermore, as long as appropriate credit is given to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, any reuse is not for commercial purposes, and any remixed works are shared under identical copyright terms.

    Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
    NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
    ShareAlike —  If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

Source: https://www.llnl.gov/copyright-and-reuse

Thank you for the link.

It might be if we hadn't frozen the tech at circa 1970.

Is that the commodity cost of the ore, or does it include the cost of the fuel rod assembly and assorted middlemen costs?

MSR's have a fail-safe design. One might still have a containment breach, but probably only through sabotage.

USA Freedom act isn't reform, it's a post getting caught minor change of and extension of the Patriot act. Reporting is still voluntary for all practical purposes. Oversight of FISC matters is still the domain of the same FISC that did close to nothing to stop the rampant abuse, except maybe give cover.

My biggest issue is the mixing of the NSA's surveillance power with domestic law enforcement.

As for your facts you've made some very loquatious attempts​. I'm skeptical as to the actual number of facts contained therein.

>I suspect those are constitutional when the are properly targeted to a specific event/person/etc. The tactics used to implement the search isn't limited by the warrant.

Almost every no knock is executed in such a way that 'proper' targeting is impossible.

A warrant cannot magically excuse police from their improper conduct. It took a deaf dumb blind and ignorant bench for that.

It takes a lot of chutzpah to make that kind of defense of the IC in 2017. It is also incredibly insulting to imply that nobody was aware of or upset about any of this before Snowden. What's clear to see is that when these concerns were being hashed out, the Tom Drakes and Bill Binneys lost. What won was so bad that we haven't even discovered the bounds of their malfeasance. The mistrust that the IC has rightly earned won't go away with such a trite dismissal. There is no proper oversight, not for any reasonable definition of the word. We wouldn't be here today if there had been.

I think you may be severely overestimating the complexity of this task. Even if it isn't a simple sphere, the shape of the cores isn't exotic.

Any oversight of the NSA is entirely voluntary. Queries may well get flagged but then what? Does every flagged query get reviewed​? We have to trust the NSA, who have clearly demonstrated that they are not to be trusted. Now in the probably very rare event that the NSA decides to tell on itself to the oversight committees, tell me just exactly what you think they are going to do about it. Nothing, that's what.

[Brandenberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio) is the case you want to look at. The court held that, to be unprotected “incitement,” speech must meet three requirements. The speaker must intend to cause violence. The violence must be the likely result of the speech. And the violence must be imminent. So, if equivalent circumstances are established, yes, the shouter might well be in trouble.

Before you quote the "fire in a theater" precedent again, please go and look up [Schenck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States) as well, since that's the origin of the quote, and because it's apparent that there is very little distance between "speech that will cause immediate harm to people isn't protected" and "speech criticizing wars isn't protected when we're at war" when you're a SCOTUS chief justice.

>If you treat the software as a black box and only study run time behavior, you have no idea if you have tripped a countermeasure that silences the malicious behavior; if you study the control flow directly, you can look for such countermeasures.

It would be great to find such a countermeasure, and be able to trigger it reliably, or assert the behavior on a permanent basis. Considering that particular weakness of such countermeasures though, wouldn't the safest [for the attacker] default countermeasure likely be to simply crash the device?

>The later search of Rettenmaier's home turned up child pornography on 5 separate device. Those facts lead me to stand where I do on this issue.

As abhorrent as CP is, the more important question here is whether the FBI's investigative tactics comply with our civil rights. It sounds exactly like the FBI set the Geek Squad on a fishing expedition. None of the stuff you added refutes that. Just because they found child pornography evidence independent of that discovered by the Geek Squad does not mean that we should be satisfied with their investigative tactics. You need to weigh this against the possibility that the FBI's "lists of targeted citizens" is obviously problematic. There are almost certainly people on that list who are in fact innocent of a crime. What if this list had been made public by a Best Buy employee? Simply having one's name on the list with [person recently prosecuted] for [abhorrent crime] could ruin a person's reputation.

>Otherwise the First Amendment, for example, would protect ... shouting fire in a crowded theater,

But that is protected speech, and the SCOTUS case it refers to was overturned long ago because it set a terrible precedent. Holmes used that analogy to support the prosecution and conviction of Charles Schenck under the Espionage Act for writing and distributing a pamphlet that expressed his opposition to the draft during World War I.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/foreign-policy-exception-first-ame...

unless you get an exact revision match they may be incompatible.

Hiding facts harms society more than it helps.

Prosecutors could choose to do those things, but our reliance on their good graces is foolish and naive. There is no meaningful feedback for these people when they do wrong. On the contrary, they are often rewarded as you say with higher political office or in private practice. There is no meaningful oversight. This is true for every element of the judiciary, prosecutors, police, and judges alike.