I’m sorry about your troubles. But why do you expect the rest of the world to bow to your anxiety issues?
Is “has trouble making eye contact” the sort of thing that requires expensive therapy sessions? Except for a few genuinely pathological cases, it seems like the sort of thing most people could fix themselves with a little practice - provided it was pointed out to them that this is a significant thing in how other people react to them.
I got a newsletter from my doctor the other day, that had a couple lines about recognizing the warning signs of heart disease. While simply reading the line, “Do you have tightness of breath climbing stairs?” isn’t going to unclog my arteries, it does alert me that there’s a potential problem that needs further attention.
Is it conceivable that the university newsletter could have a similar function - alerting someone to a possible problem in their social interactions - without having to include the entire solution to the problem in its text?
That’s…the exact opposite of what I’m saying. Please read for comprehension next time.
So let’s examine the choices:
Option 1: Burn fossil fuels, dump millions of tonnes of CO2 and various toxic chemicals into the air. The CO2 risks a global catastrophe that could change the entire planet.
Option 2: Smash some atoms together and create clean electricity that pumps nothing into the air but steam. However, this option has a local ‘garbage disposal problem’.
Stated that way, is there any real choice? If global climate change represents an existential threat to the ecosystem and our way of life, and nuclear is the only way to reasonably halt it or slow it down, doesn’t nuclear win hands down?
If you truly, honestly believe that climate change is the greatest threat facing the planet, then even if we had a nuclear spill every year wouldn’t it still be superior to fossil fuels? After all, those spills are localized to a small dot on the planet, while climate change is a global phenomenon.
Of course, if you don’t like that dichotomy, you can always put your head in the sand and scream for the magic power source of your dreams that is zero impact, silent, clean, and cheap. The only problem with that plan is that such a power source doesn’t exist.
First of all, they are not necessarily decentralized. Wind power usually comes from huge wind farms, and solar power from gigantic solar facilities. Rooftop solar is a rounding error in our energy production, and will be for a long time.
And the PROBLEM with wind and solar is that it’s the energy itself that’s decentralized. The value of fossil fuel is that it basically consists of concentrated solar power condensed into easily usable fuel. If you try to use solar power as it’s hitting the earth, you rapidly run into the big problem that the energy is diffuse, and therefore you need a whole lot of raw materials to extract it.
The other problem with solar and wind power is that it’s periodic and variable. That makes it a really hard energy source to use for base-load power. That’s why Germany currently has so much solar and wind power that on a sunny, breezy day it can provide for over 100% of the country’s electricity needs, and yet on an annual basis it only accounts for about 20% of Germany’s electricity, and less than 10% of Germany’s total energy needs.
Germany is a good case study in how long it would take to build out a real alternative to fossil fuels with renewable power. Germany has done pretty much everything they can to move to renewables - carbon taxes, major subsidies for wind and solar installations, subsidies to manufacturers of alternative energy hardware, generous feed-in tariffs paid for by all energy consumers, you name it.
The country is festooned with solar panels after almost two decades of full-steam ahead policies - over 1.4 million solar installations are spread throughout Germany, and Germany has one of the highest energy costs in Europe as a result.
And for all this effort, solar alone provides for only 6.9% of Germany’s electricity needs. Angela Merkel’s rash decision to shut down Germany’s nuclear plants after the Fukushima accident will remove almost twice as much clean power from the grid as solar has managed to provide after 20 years of heavily subsidized growth.
And Germany is constantly hailed as the world leader in the race to build wind and solar power as an alternative to fossil fuels. If this is all they’ve got to show for it after so many billions of dollars and decades of effort, just how long do you think it would take for these technologies to make a real dent in replacing fossil fuel globally? Given that alarmists keep claiming we only have a decade or two to ‘solve’ the problem, do you honestly think wind and solar have a chance of helping here? Really?
But it gets worse. The countries/states/provinces that have managed to get significant amounts of wind and solar into their power grids are discovering that once you get to around 20% of capacity, the variable nature of the power starts to really mess things up. It is not a simple matter to transition from a grid that has controlled supply that can scale with demand to one where the supply comes in intermittently and not necessarily when you need it.
Germany has to pay factories to shut down on days when no wind or solar is available, because they don’t have enough baseload left when the variable power drops offline. Germany also has to import power from other places in Europe, and so the impact on their CO2 emissions is fairly small - the U.S. has actually reduced its CO2 output by more than double that of Germany, due to the fracking revolution. And now Germany’s CO2 emissions are actually increasing, because added supply of renewables isn’t keeping up with economic and population growth. It will get worse once they decommission their nuclear plants.
South Australia is experiencing brownouts and blackouts. Ontario’s power is starting to become unstable. Those places also have the highest energy costs in their respective regions, and have very little to show for it in terms of CO2 savings.
Also bear in mind that the progress made to date includes the ‘low hanging fruit’ - the best locations for wind and solar are the first ones you use up. As we try to get beyond that, the costs start to spike dramatically.
So… If you’re rejecting fission nuclear because you’re hoping for fusion, does that mean you’re willing to bet the future of the planet on a technology that still hasn’t even been proven to provide break-even energy in a laboratory setting?
Let’s say we ‘cracked’ fusion tomorrow. Just how long you think it would take from that point to having a viable engineering plan and a design for the first large-scale fusion plant? How long do you think it would take to build and test such a plant? And after that plant was built, how long do you think it would take before we built enough such plants to power the planet?
If your answer is ‘years’, you’re off by at least an order of magnitude. We are talking about decades. Maybe a century. Are you willing to just stand by and wait for that, and let us keep using fossil fuel without punishment while we wait? Or is your hope for fusion just a way to reconcile your brain with the conflicting ideas that global warming is damaging the planet and must be stopped, yet conventional nuclear power is unacceptable?
In any event, fusion is 30 years away… and it’s been 30 years away for about the past 40 years. So let’s not get our hopes up too much that fusion power will save us. Maybe it will power the homes of our great-great-great grandchildren.
The truth is, there is only ONE power source that we could possibly hope to scale up to the point where it makes a serious dent in fossil fuels in a reasonable time frame, and that’s nuclear. Every serious global warming believer should be pushing for nuclear power R&D and regulatory reform to accelerate it. This should be their primary focus, as nothing else really matters until we have an alternative energy source that will actually work for us.
instead, we have shams like the Paris climate talks, which are basically exercises in political grandstanding. Lots of speeches are made, everyone agrees that what we really need is higher taxes and more political power for the people who attend such conferences, and then everyone goes home and proceeds to ignore everything that was agreed to except for the tax hikes, because nothing is binding anyway and there’s no enforcement mechanism.
Focusing on moving nuclear power forward is a perfect end-run around the gridlock of politics. Make nuclear power competitive against fossil fuels, and you won’t need to coerce people and fine them to switch - they’ll do it because it’s profitable to do so. And making non-fossil energy profitable is the fastest way to kick off a planetary shift away from CO2 emitting energy.
And unlike solar and wind, cost-effectiveness is possible with nuclear. The grid infrastructure doesn’t have to change, there are no baseload problems, and nuclear is cheap if done right - France gets 70% of its power from nuclear, and it has much lower energy prices than its neighbors, and MUCH lower than Germany’s.
Not only could this be done, but you could get the right-wing on your side in a heartbeat. The right has always been more open to nuclear power than the left.
So keep the carbon taxes in place, but take every nickel of it and use it to fund nuclear R&D and to provide subsidies to nuclear providers instead of solar providers. Create a panel consisting of nuclear scientists and engineers along with environmental efforts, and task them with a regulatory overhaul that removes the worst impediments against nuclear power. For example, a law which forbids cease-and-desist lawsuits after a new nuclear plant has been approved for construction. Streamlined regulatory approval for new solar plants that use reference designs that have already been approved. That sort of thing.
The reason nuclear costs as much as it does in the states is because nuclear power is extremely capital intensive, and therefore delays in construction are incredibly expensive. If you’ve got 5 billion dollars invested and someone manages to throw an injunction on your project that delays you for a couple of years, that can cost you 500 million dollars. That makes nuclear investment risky, which means investors demand a risk premium on their return that makes nuclear more expensive. And of course, that’s exactly what anti-nuclear activists count on. They tie up projects for years or decades, drive the costs through the roof, and use those costs to ‘prove’ that nuclear is no cheaper than wind and solar.
If you believe in stimulus plans, how about this? Take 500 billion dollars, and offer it as a matching fund for construction of nuclear plants until the money is gone. If a plant costs 5 billion dollars and the private sector puts up half the money, you could build 200 nuclear plants. They could be up and running in a decade or two, and 200 nuclear plants would be enough to power the entire U.S. transportation fleet if it converted to electric power. There are currently about 450 nuclear plants in the world, and they provided about 10% of global electricity last year.
Another option would be to take the proceeds from carbon taxes and put them in a pool to be used to pay for spill cleanups, waste disposal and create a high risk pool for investors to hedge their investments.
Want to provide aid to Africa? Small Modular Reactors can be brought in by trailer, buried in the ground, and the steam heat from them used to drive surface turbines that produce power. A single SMR that fits on a flatbed truck can power thousands of homes. They release no waste at all - the spent byproducts remain inside the reactor, and you just dig them up after 10 years, install a new one, and haul the old one away for recycling. Some SMRs can even burn current nuclear waste, helping us with that problem as well.
Because they can be buried deep underground and encased in concrete vaults, they can be completely protected from terrorists - a simple monitoring program could ensure that military forces could respond to an attempted theft of a reactor long before the terrorists could manage to extract it from its casing.
SMR’s can be anywhere from 25MWe to 300MWe. Here’s what a 300 MW solar farm looks like: Europe’s largest wind farm. Look at the resources and land being used up - when finished, Cestas will consist of about 1 million solar panels and will cover 250 hectares of land, or 2.5 square kilometers of land. And that solar farm would produce maybe 10-20% of the power of the SMR, because the SMR runs 24/7 and the solar plant only makes its rated power when the sun is shining brightly. That plant will also use immense amounts of water to keep the solar panels clean.
And here’s an equivalent SMR, Hitachi’s PRISM reactor.. Instead of five square kilometers of steel, copper, and rare earth minerals, a 600 MWe facility containing two SMRs is about the size of a medium factory. Three of those installations would produce more power than does the entire country of Kenya. Just think what availability of power on that scale at low cost could do for the economic development of Africa.
Instead of this incredibly logical way of attacking global warming, the global warming movement is focused on a bizarre mix of taxes, incentives, regulations, subsidies, global treaties, and other interventions in the economy that to date have produced pretty much zero results other than to raise taxes on a lot of people to provide money to cronies. They seem to be willing to accept only wind and solar power, despite ample evidence that those sources will never replace more than a few percentage points of global power, and only after extreme effort. It’s crazy.
I think it’s fairly well known Australia is a huge coal exporter and I have no doubt a large part of the climate change denial is to do with the implications it would have on that industry.
However, I also think there’s a pragmatic issue at play. Australia is an expensive country to live in - a large Big Mac Meal is over $10 (USD$7.50), it’s not unusual for the average house price is well overAUD$500,000 in the capital cities (the exception being Hobart, in Tasmania), and then you’ve got the Australia Tax, the inexplicably higher costs on things here because fuck you, that’s why.
There’s a real concern among people I’ve spoken with that acknowleding climate change and doing something about it is going to make life for the average person even more expensive - as large companies won’t swallow the cost of mitigating C02 output or anything like that.
While I fully support renewable energy, I’m also of the unpopular belief that it’s not very efficient and it’s still too expensive. Personally, I think nuclear power is brilliant and it genuinely astounds me, given that the majority of Australia is uninhabitable desert - and we have lots of uranium here - that we aren’t the Atomic Power Capital of the known universe.
The last time I checked, most of the opposition to nuclear power came from the left. If you see a “No Nuclear Power!” car sticker, there’s a pretty good likelihood it’ll be accompanied by one or more of the “Sea Shepherd” sticker, an Aboriginal flag sticker, a “The Greens” political party emblem, or a “Magic Happens/Don’t Drive Faster Than Your Guardian Angel Can Fly/Powered By Fairy Dust”-variety sticker.
I haven’t worked in the US media, but it’s famously partisan and from what I’ve seen of it, it either takes itself Super Doubly Extremely seriously or it’s… very clearly telling its target audience what they want to hear, IMHO.
The answer is that yes, it’s conceivable.
It’s conceivable I can sit down at the poker table and flop a straight flush in the first hand.
I don’t think “is it conceivable” is the proper test.
So, just to be clear, you’re saying that the chances of someone reading a pamphlet that emphasizes the importance of eye contact, and then going on and using that advice to work more on their eye contact, is about as likely to happen as being dealt a straight flush in poker?
I don’t play a lot of poker. Are straight flushes a lot more common than I’ve been led to believe? Because that doesn’t really seem like such an outlandish idea, to me.
Sorry, what are we testing for?
Aren’t you the same person who marched for fifty odd pages to insist that even the tiniest number of illegal votes might have a cataclysmic effect?
Or are you the other guy?
Happens all the time, sit right over here, I’ll get you some chips. Start with, say, couple hundred?
The neighbor of Vizzini of course…
Challenging another poster’s credentials is acceptable.
Claiming that a poster is not decent, informed, or well-educated because one disagrees with the poster’s arguments is a personal attack.
This is a Warning to dial back on the personal hostility in these discussions.
[ /Moderating ]
What qualifies as “mainstream” left-wing news? Here are some of the big names.
- New York Times
- Washington Post
- The Guardian
- CNN
- MSNBC
Like it or not, these sources overwhelmingly attempt to provide a reasoned, balanced take of the news. They’re not going to keep something out of the headlines just because their side doesn’t like it. They didn’t slavishly defend Obama, or refuse to publish on major administration scandals simply because he was a democrat. As Vox so kindly explained:
What qualifies as “mainstream” right-wing news? Here are some of the big names.
- Fox News
- Breitbart
- Rush Limbaugh/other AM Radio personalities
- The Wall Street Journal
Like it or not, these sources overwhelmingly attempt to provide the “right-wing perspective” to the news. There’s extensive documentation of the lengths these folks go to slag off the democrats and boost republicans. From that same Vox article:
(By the way, that article is really worth reading. It’s got some pretty important info in it.)
That’s the difference. You can complain all you want about a left-wing bend at the Times, but the moment you want to start to compare it to the right-wing bend at FOX, or most AM radio hosts, the comparison goes flying right out the window into the realm of the absurd, because there simply is no reasonable comparison. The New York Times is run predominately by liberals, and aims to be a fair, balanced, cosmopolitan news source that reports the news. FOX News is run predominately by republicans and aims to be a propaganda arm of the republican party.
This quote, and the Bricker post you refer to, are examples of why it is so hard for conservatives and liberals to communicate with each other.
That some people have other reasons for behavior that others might think is “aggressive” is no excuse for the behavior when it is due to racism. (“Racism” includes some behavior most would accept, e.g. preferring sexual partners of a certain ethnicity, but this is not what’s being debated here.)
To make the point clear, consider the following exchange:
Joey L: “Chocolate brownies are good.”
Richie C: “No, my aunt Sarah broke her tooth on a brownie with a walnut shell fragment hidden, so YOU’RE WRONG! Ha ha!”
Bricker and sleestak would happily take the side of Richie here, at least if it furthered some political argument.
The stubbornness demonstrated in arguing against liberal sensitivities resembles such 5th-grade “debates.” Right-wingers get a good chuckle, and get to draw their bubbles closer, but conversation with liberals just increases in difficulty.
Just to clarify from my above post, when I say “overwhelmingly”, I mean “most of the sources”. I’m not saying that the Wall Street Journal is quite akin to Breitbart, nor am I implying that The Guardian is non-partisan.
I found that post to be very worthwhile; thanks for articulating it so well!
I think you’re onto something about US liberal media at least trying to do Actual Journalism™, with the more conservative outlets basically providing their own take on things for an audience that wants to hear that angle and not what “The Other Side” think.
The serious journalists in the US doing Actual Journalism™ do some incredible and amazing work, though.
You’re welcome. I really recommend reading that Vox article I linked to, it helps explain this scenario quite well.
No. But I’m saying both pass your question:
MILLER: Is it conceivable that the university newsletter could have a similar function - alerting someone to a possible problem in their social interactions - without having to include the entire solution to the problem in its text?
University newsletter? Yes.
Straight flush? Yes.
Where did you get “about as likely?”
I got “about as likely” from you directly comparing the two situations. If the only purpose of you making that particular comparison was to highlight that “conceivable” is a very broad phrase, well, yes, it is. That’s why I used it. You seemed to be dismissing the possibility that there could be any possible benefit at all from having that instruction in there. Now, we agree that not only is it possible that there’s a useful reason for having such an instruction, we have established that it happening is “more likely than drawing a straight flush in poker.” That’s a pretty good basement. Would you care to refine the possibility up any higher than that?
Also, given that you agree that there’s a possibility (of some currently undefined likelihood) that someone could be helped by that pamphlet, what is meant to be demonstrated by the existence of that pamphlet? At this point, it appears to be, “Liberals are more likely to overestimate the effectiveness of explanatory pamphlets.”
Were you trying to establish something as fact via this post? If so, what? It sounds like you and Vox have an opinion on the matter. I have a different opinion.
Post snipped.
First, racism is bad. Actions that are based on racism are bad.
The problem is the bolded piece. If person A doesn’t make eye contact with person B, it could be racism. Or it could be shyness. Or it could be that person A was checking out person Cs ass. How do you suss out which is true?
With the microagression example Bricker gave, the other possible explanations are discounted immediately. It is racist by default. The guidance tells people to read other peoples minds and make harsh judgments about the people for behaviors that are not clear indicators of racism.
Do you see how that is problematic and actually makes things worse?
Slee