369 karma · joined September 11, 2012
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/world/europe/coronavirus-...
Normally I don't link NYT, but there is no paywall for Coronavirus coverage.
People talk about efficiency, but efficiency also means fragile because there is no slack or fat in the system.
I think most Canadians recognize Alberta as a have province from the perspective of transfer payments, but that may change quickly if oil prices stay at this level for long making Albertans net recipients of transfer payments. I'm less sure that most Albertans realize just how badly managed benefits from oil resources have been used in the province. I'm talking Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund compared to Norway (Government Pension Fund), or even Alaska (Alaska Permanent Fund). It's bad even when you consider the high price of oil sand extraction, never mind the higher clean-up costs.
The only reference I could quickly find to this "Floating Receipt" concept was: https://static.usenix.org/event/evt07/tech/full_papers/rives...
I'm opposed to the construction of new nuclear plants (still open to possibility of new fusion plants at some in the future) but from an environmental standpoint it makes far more sense to maintain the existing nuclear plants - at least for now.
The biggest drawbacks of nuclear power (expensive and slow plant construction) are off the table with existing plants! Hardening existing plants against possible future catastrophe is probably far cheaper in both economic and human terms than new coal plan construction.
Japan already does pretty good job (relatively speaking) with solar power, but it could do much better with the money it will spend on new coal plants if it built more wind power and fixed up existing nuclear plants.
Would you view presto in its current state as a replacement for vanilla Postgres with FDW for standard data analysis queries? I don't fully understand the Postgres/Presto relationship.
Headlines like these are the equivalent of scientific papers with no citations, no coauthors, no acknowledgements - as if the author was solely responsible for creating all the value merely by thinking in the aether. These types of scientific papers don't exist outside crank pot science for good reason - they are ludicrous. Just like this headline.
While Iceland may not be a privacy paradise, I still think Icelandic hosted servers provide a higher barrier than US based servers for government data collection. The US government has a history of high volume warrant-free collection of user data - your setup in Icelandic appears more resilient to this approach. However, as others have pointed out, Icelandic hosted systems are still vulnerable to traffic analysis as well as physical and legal attacks on servers and key holders. The solutions to these types of problems though are more political than technical.
I wanted to refute the author's claim by looking at google n-grams, but the viewer cuts off in 2008 with the steampunk n-gram still going strong...
Instead I present anecdotal evidence that steampunk is not dead:
1. The presence of an steampunk section in my local Spirit of Halloween store.
2. The release of Carnival Row this year by Amazon, which I believe fits the bill close enough.
3. A continuing new release of steampunk novels (https://www.goodreads.com/genres/steampunk)
Flimsy evidence, but perhaps enough to refute the death of steampunk, which is a strong claim.
Of interest though is this study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3073842 which indicates that prices are 7% than they would be otherwise.
Really, the only technology? Not inshore wind turbines? Not hydrochlorofluorocarbon elimination?
"that can really help us in the next 10 years."
I doubt California could build a nuclear power plant in 10 years, and even if they did it would be crazy expensive and still take several years before it became operational. There are better ways to reduce and remove CO2 for the money.
Having said that, I (and probably many environmentalists) would still keep Diablo Canyon given the sunk costs and benefits. However it doesn't mean I think we should be spending money building more nuclear power plants.
Also, by your qualifying "long term" I assume you think they are fine short and even intermediate term? Given the urgency of the climate crisis, short and intermediate term matters - a lot.
I agree with you that public transportation and the "elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle" (hard to define, but giving you the most charitable interpretation here) is very important. However, we don't have to choose one or the other, the decision as to which car to buy is typically an individual decision and I would think it correlates well with support for greener public transportation. Additionally, I fine it hard to believe that even in the long term there will be no need electric cars in more distant areas. Finally, development of electric cars and their infrastructure will also support electric public buses used for public transportation.
I'm glad Singapore is pursuing public transportation (a no-brainer in a city state) but the claim that it is not a "proper solution" isn't helpful and worse, it assumes that there is a solution. There isn't. There are MANY solutions which will be implemented at different speeds, with different levels of effectiveness and by many different organizations and individuals.
In general, it is better to encourage any useful efforts on this front rather than arguing that solution X isn't "proper" or less effective than solution Y.
See also: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6379814/
Most Japanese may support whaling, but don't actually eat the meat. The government has also been requiring whale meat in school lunches which has upset parents who don't want their kids eating whale meat, for either ethical reasons or the sheer amount of toxins that accumulate in whale meat.
Blaming the government is much more useful than blaming the public - policy can be changed, their position is articulated in press releases and documents. Trying to capture the diversity of the Japanese population and hold it accountable is an exercise in futility and is just muddying the waters.
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/09/06/iea-gets-hilariously-sl...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/05/iea-accu...
Although not as at risk as Miami, Shanghai is one of the most vulnerable cities in the world. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/03/miami-shangha...
Shanghai is already one of the most important cities of the world - today. Predicting the future is something else, although I certainly expect Shanghai to do better than Miami, and probably New York as well.
The entire article is written as a polemic (which is fine) but it argues against various straw-men and obfuscates the problems with nuclear power today. Some examples include:
Caiming it is "fantasy" that renewables alone can power the transition to a carbon free economy. Their argument? "Wind and solar power are becoming cheaper, but they are not available around the clock, rain or shine, and batteries that could power entire cities for days or weeks". This confused statement doesn't actually address the best argument of renewable energy advocates - that renewables could power entire cities if given sufficient generation and storage capacity. An argument indicating the limits of renewable power generation and battery production is required, but the article makes no such argument because it would not hold water. Also, if there is no daylight for weeks (nuclear winter?) there may be bigger problems to address than carbon emissions.
Also, the article does itself no favors by comparing itself to coal. This is a dying energy source (especially in the US) - the fact that nuclear is better than coal impresses no one.
Another trick used is sentences like this "By contrast, in 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm". It is quite likely that most nuclear incidents raised no alarm because they weren't reported. The public incidents cited were simply too large to go unnoticed. Does anybody believe the only lethal accident or cancer causing radioactive lease in the Soviet Union was Chernobyl?
Another crazy claim is "Nuclear waste is compact — America’s total from 60 years would fit in a Walmart — and is safely stored in concrete casks and pools, becoming less radioactive over time.". This is simply not correct as written. If America's waste was well managed it might fit into a Walmart (I didn't do the math), but it is isn't. It is a poorly manged mess, even leaking into groundwater like at Hanford. Hanford's cleanup wouldn't cost $113+ billion to clean up if nuclear waste sat in well organized casks in a Walmart sized warehouse. And Hanford is is just one (large) site (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site).
Finally, the article deals with nuclear proliferation with this paragraph: "Nuclear power plants cannot explode like nuclear bombs, and they have not contributed to weapons proliferation, thanks to robust international controls: 24 countries have nuclear power but not weapons, while Israel and North Korea have nuclear weapons but not power." Again, no one is claiming that that nuclear plants explode like nuclear bombs (straw man). However, claiming they have no contributed to weapons proliferation requires a special reading of the paragraph where proliferation counts only as documented cases of nuclear material migrating across borders to be incorporated in nuclear weapons. The fact that nuclear plants produce material for nuclear weapons (whether it crosses a border or not) means nuclear power can (and does) contribute to weapon development. Israel may not have nuclear power plants, but it has "research" nuclear plants (Dimona) that probably produced the material for its bombs.
It's unclear to me if this is a good faith opinion piece.
I also agree the tool looks nice but relation support is definitely something that I also would need to see supported.
No humans were even alive during this period. We don't know if human life or modern civilization is compatible with this very different environment.
Pointing out that the earth used to be warmer (which we know it has been before in the very distant past) may make people feel better about global warming, but that's the only benefit I can think of. The downside is that it makes it easier for people to postpone the needed action to fix the climate and fails to address the anticipated economic and human lethal consequences of climate change.
Additionally it is hard to fully evaluate the impact of scientific work fully until many years have passed since publication.
It's no wonder they prefer to find their winners in the 80s. ..
I sometimes wonder if authors of these pro-nuclear articles are paid to astroturf for the nuclear power industry or if they are just unaware of what solar is capable of.
The "huge amounts of land" claim is incorrect (https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power...) and in reality much of solar power could be deployed on urban hardscapes.
The second claim seems to ignore the possibility of batteries and other large scale energy storage, never mind that solar would be complemented by other renewable energy sources.
The other problem with the nuclear industry (ignoring all the much talked about safety and waste storage issues) is that it ends up being a centralized power source. Living in a solar unfriendly state with the most profitable energy utility in the country (no rate review in 30+ years) I do not want to see any more centralization and the corresponding corruption. Yeah, I know centralization doesn't imply corruption and abuse of power, but it sure makes it easier.
From inside the bubble of absolute power (when you have already killed and tortured dissidents, rivals and potential threats) adding this journalist to the kill list probably didn't seem like such a big deal. He was apparently surprised by the reaction to the whole affair. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/22/saudi-khashoggi-claims-...
However, his work with linux and git is at least comparable to that of other big scientific names known more for their engineering impact - like Van Leeuwenhoek. I'd also say the impact of Linus is greater, in part because of his insistence on making Linux GPL early on, rather than the secretive approach taken by someone like Van Leeuwenhoek.
The Tudeh and Fedaian were more important in finishing off the government than theocracy supporters, and even the powerful People's Mujahedin (which was Islamist) did not want a theocracy.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution#Opposition_...
It is not just about viewing unsightly plastic, but also ingestion of plastic and chemicals associated with plastic such as phthalates and endocrine disruptors. While spoilage is in issue, so are the various health problems associated with plastic. While there are too many unstudied plastic associated chemicals to quantify the impact, a number of them are clearly associated with cancer, obesity and infertility.
This month's issue of National Geographic is devoted to the problem of plastic in the ocean and is worth a look.
I'm not making the claim that yeoman farming is more productive. I do claim however that such laws are sufficient to crush indigenous agriculture because enclosure is a violent and effective process for doing so.
"Seizing land isn't "banning farming""
Enclosure laws aren't a ban (no society has ever banned farming to my knowledge), but they effectively put some farmers out of work if they engage in a particular type of subsistence agriculture. That is farmers that utilize a community owned shared hunting ground/pasture/cropland on land without a title recognized by the state.
"Displaced farmers would still have been able to buy back the original land and continue"
Your typical indigenous person or tribe who is having their land enclosed or confiscated doesn't have the capital to buy it back, assuming they are even have the knowledge, language and legal framework on how to go about with that process. They are likely not even interested in agriculture for the purpose of making money, and if they were, do you really imagine people like the Orang Rimba are going to buy back their land? http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41981430 It's going to be palm oil plantations no matter how effectively they were using the land - assuming anyone is even measuring.
Not completely true, see the Inclosure Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts
It's not unique to England either, it's just well documented there. Generally speaking the process of removing subsistence hunters, herders and farmers off of land they have historically lived off takes place with violence - not because they can't pay the rent anymore.
Additionally, the claim on the land of the people who are generally doing the displacing is usually questionable at best...
This isn't a matter of history either, taking land held in common by indigenous people with little if any recompense is a process that continues today in many parts of the world.