saintcelestine

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[saintcelestine]

Nuclear power and the environment

The easiest way to feel better is to realize that there's no side-effect-free way to generate power. If you want to live a modern existence with nice things, nuclear is the safest way to do it. The alternative to nuclear power is coal, which puts out as much radioactive waste as a nuclear plant (except up the smokestack instead of used fuel rods), plus tons of heavy metals and shit, plus massive environmental damage strip mining for coal, plus the occasional fly ash spill (probably more damaging than the current state of Fukushima). Wind/solar can't deliver baseloads without leveling systems, which are either huge environmental alterations (pumped storage) or huge quantities of batteries made with materials that are toxic to produce. And biofuels consume huge amounts of land, take food out of the mouths of poor people, and contribute to aquifer depletion. The construction and operation of wind turbines has killed more people than nuclear, while generating a tiny fraction of the power. People fall off turbines, blades shatter or hurl gigantic chunks of ice. Coal passively kills tens of thousands of people every year with pollution. But those aren't big sexy accidents that the media can work themselves into a lather over. It's not just you, generally speaking humans are really bad at comparing probability. We worry about flying when driving is more likely to kill us, because it's an unusual thing that we don't normally do. And we worry about radiation instead of falling off a wind turbine.

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Tom Clancy's stupid books that were full of stupid.

Since Tom Clancy died, and I can think of no-one who had more of a hard on for the cold war than him, lets talk about the cold war. 

Red Storm Rising, one of his more interesting books, before they all turn to shit, talks about a Soviet Invasion of Western Europe. Which almost turns into a full blown nuclear war. Why didnt it?

You can't knock out the enemy sufficiently to neuter them though- (especially by the late 70's, with 50,000+ warheads around) that was the sticking point of MAD, and the reason for spreading/hiding your deterrent as best you could, so the enemy doesn't play because there isn't a winning move, you can always be hit back (also why SDI was such a potential destabilizing game changer, "I can hit you, you can't hit me nearly as well"). If I was that Soviet general, I wouldn't be having a paddle in the channel after a week of rolling through Europe, NATO doctrine demands that my lovely armoured divisions got their tank crews all neutroned up after it became clear that the onwards march of global communism is unstoppable by conventional means. 

Someone launches say, a few dozen ICBM's at you. Until very late in the stage, you have no idea of where they are headed. It might be a few military bases, or they might be intended for your government, or your super shiny expensive missile fields. There might be single warheads aboard, maybe your opponent said "fuck START, load up 50 MIRV's on each those fuckers". So, you launch them, because otherwise your command and control might be killed or disrupted, or one of your best weapons systems just got turned into a lot of burnt corn fields you don't want to go near, because you don't have time to think this over clearly. Your opponent sees you do the same, and starts fretting over their remaining missile fields (and there are a metric fuckton of them). They launch more. You launch a shitload more, because now the first batch are already on re-entry, and this might be your last few moments.  Or, you just got whacked by an SLBM strike, there is no clear command and control, and your "dead hand" system triggers and issues commands automatically for massive retaliation.  Or, the other side gets real lucky, and decapitates your CnC. The headless chicken that's left, however, is more than capable of pressing the right buttons- again, it's how nuclear warfare is set up, to make it such an unattractive proposition, to make mutual death so likely no sane person would go for it- that's the problem. People aren't sane, and the systems they put in place prone to error but very efficient at causing megadeaths.  There's many of ways it could have gone full with neither side wanting it, and the whole system was designed around massive retaliation and surviving a first strike so you can hit back adequately. It's the two sides of the MAD coin, reduce the risk of it happening on one side, increase the risk of it being full blown on the other. 

Cold war history is probably the most interesting period of time in human history. 

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Black Holes are Terrifying

Black holes are weird to conceptualize because a lot of their properties (gravity, density, how much they warp space-time) is not just really large, but infinite. Imagine how dense the sun is and how much gravity it exudes. Now, multiply those numbers times a trillion trillion trillion trillion. Then multiply THAT number by 10100000000. Multiply that by any number you want, no matter how big. The singularity is still denser and its gravity is still stronger. I said nothing can "burst" out of a black hole because the escape velocity of a black hole isn't just some arbitrary number that just so happens to be higher than light such that in theory you could just go that number + 1 and pop right out of the black hole. There is no velocity that would allow for escape. Space is curved in on itself. Even if you went infinitely fast, you would not be able to escape. Once inside, space is so distorted that every direction points to the singularity - even time as we know it becomes a spatial dimension pointing to the singularity; so, in other words, even if you did go infinitely fast, you would have to go in some direction and the only direction that exists anymore is towards the singularity. The closest thing that happens to what you are asking is that sometimes when matter falls into a black hole, it heats up so much that it emits a ton of energy. This stuff isn't bursting out of the black hole, since it's not past the "point of no return" - the event horizon. It's the result of matter from the accretion disk heating up. Sometimes, very massive black holes will shoot out jets of plasma from their poles, but again, this is due to interactions of matter in the accretion disk. Black holes are terrifying.

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Under capitalism, wealth and power are almost always the exact same thing. If you've got wealth you've got power, and if you've got power you've almost definitely got wealth.

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You know all that stuff you hear about global warming from CO2 and other gases? All (or most of) the CO2 that's locked up in coal or peat or oil or whatever used to be in the atmosphere, but plants and other processes sequestered it, and when they died, more of it was buried than came out as they decayed. So over a very long time, the global atmospheric CO2 concentration declined, and along with other processes, this caused the Earth to cool. Now, mankind in all its wisdom has decided to vent all this CO2 back into the atmosphere, and to do it over a very short period of time (decades and centuries, rather than millions of years). We're heading for our own KT extinction event over the next few generations, and it's not going to be pretty.

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Airports see more sincere kisses than wedding halls. The walls of hospitals have heard more prayers than the walls of churches.

(via mappish)

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I don’t understand how any laws of any kind by any state will ever be able to apply to anything in deep space. I mean, if I have the capability to grab an asteroid in space and extract space-platinum from it, who is going to stop me? The space UN? If I had the capability and wanted to fly to Neptune and declare myself King/Emperor/Mayor of Neptune, what could anyone do about it? Sue me? Are you going to sue me on Neptune? You would have to come to Neptune and Neptune is mine now bitches! I will shoot platinum fucking space asteroids at you if you try it!

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You’ve probably heard of The Great Gatsby. But what about The Great Gatsby Curve?

It’s a pretty wonky chart that illustrates how rising inequality is jeopardizing our tradition of economic mobility for future generations.

So what does this mean? Kids of wealthy parents already have more opportunities to succeed than children of poor families—and this is likely to get worse unless we take steps to ensure that all children have access to quality education, health care, and other opportunities that give them a fair shot at economic success.

Learn more.

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On the excesses of Capitalism

Seen numerous headlines decrying the excesses of "Social Democracy", comparing it to Socialism, and how its one step away from Mao and Stalin.

A few things to note. A social democracy still relies on the mechanisms of capitalism to function. Land, factories and machines are still privately traded, stock in companies can still be owned privately, but legislation is used to account for the inherent instability of capitalism by redistributing money through taxation and welfare. The state sits parallel to the economic system to pull it back into line.

Socialism is a different way of organising the economy overall, where workers are entitled to a share of the profits their company makes commensurate with some agreed-upon metric of wealth created, ideally equal to the amount of labour they have performed for the company. E: companies are, of course, not the only way of organising a theoretical socialist economy but they're a common one. Picture it this way. Social democracy is where workers go to a privately-owned company and work for a wage, and the government takes some of the profits as taxation and doles it out as social spending. Socialism is where the workers own the company jointly and are paid a percentage of its profits, rather than a fixed wage. That's very simplistic but it's an illustration. The issue socialists tend to have with social democracies, besides the worrying tendency of social democrats to embrace fascism when presented with a choice between it and socialism, is that capitalism is inherently unstable by socialist thought, and so is any system built on it. The New Deal is used as an example of how hard-won concessions by the state to labour can be eroded by the constant application of a system of low-key propaganda and the gradual concentration in the hands of those with money.

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When will people realize that corporations will get away with whatever they can get away with to increase their profits? It's up to the government to regulate them and stop them. If the government gets taken over by corporations and begins regulating on their behalf, it's up to the people to regulate their government. If the people can't do that effectively, then nothing will change.