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caze

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Everything posted by caze

  1. you forgot the bit where they were calling for Corbyn to be hung. I mean, I'm not exactly a massive Corbyn fan, but eh.... Swinson is doing a good job so far, most people in Britain still probably have no idea who she is, but she's a bit more visible than the last few leaders, I can see her appealing to far more voters than them too. I agree with the Lib Dem revoke stance, the only problem with it is it's a bit too easily distorted. It's only for if they get a majority, but they'd settle for another referendum in a coalition government. Probably too easy for others to make hay with that confusion. I'd happily revoke article 50 myself tomorrow if I could though. They definitely had the best party conference out of the three of them, saw a nice bump in the polling thanks to that. Labour's was an utter disaster, and the Tories are all over the place.
  2. well if he did that then it wouldn't be up to him, it's the courts you'd need to place your trust in.
  3. Is his stance an attempt to disguise the fact that he's a fat fuck?
  4. Yes, this is exactly it. The problem is entirely one of perception and public acceptance, there are no technological or practical issues when it comes to dealing with waste. Greenpeace and the likes have a lot to answer for. Sadly most politicians find it easier to chase votes with fear mongering than presenting an optimistic and reasonable platform. Coal plants operating normally churn out massive amounts of toxic materials (not including CO2) into the atmosphere, probably causing between a minimum of tens of thousands and up to a million deaths every year from respiratory issues, cancers and other ailments around the world, in itself nothing compared to the damage climate change could do by the end of the century. And people are worried about nuclear waste? Which has killed exactly zero people in over 50 years. smdh. NIMBYism really is one of the worst flaws people have too, responsible for a massive amount of our problems; and not just on issues like this, but other energy and waste management things too, also the biggest impediment to affordable housing, and dealing with immigration too. Certain things really need to be taken out of the control of local lobbying groups, these things are just too important for both national and global stability.
  5. Sorry, but the idea that there are a bunch of democrats who secretly support Trump over Sanders is so ludicrous there was no other way to respond (I wouldn't be surprised if maybe Tulsi Gabbard supported him over some of the other candidates, certainly many of her supporters would - as did many Bernie supporters last time, but I can't think of anyone else, and she's not a centrist obviously). It was even easier to do when you also failed to realise that Sanders and Trump were on the same page when it came to trade policy. If you're going to have an out-there political take, at least be aware of the basics.
  6. Nuclear waste is a complete non-issue, bizarre how people have managed to turn into a big deal in their minds. It doesn't take up much space, you just put it in a cask and store it for a while. Ultimately it'll all be turned into more fuel, the idea that it's going to need to be stored for thousands of years is nonsense. But if you did need to, no big deal, just bury it under a mountain. Here is the entirety of Switzerland's nuclear waste (around 50 years worth from 5 reactors): The contents of each cask only takes up a fraction of the container (most of it is thick layers of protective shielding), the waste itself is a solid ceramic material, chemically stable, just a bit warm. If you were to reprocess it with current technologies you'd be left with about 5% of the mass as highly radioactive waste (this is a good thing in terms of waste, because it means it has a very short half-life), the rest can be used to fuel other reactors. There are a handful of isotopes you couldn't use as fuel, or would cost energy to transmute to a stable isotope so you might not bother, but either they're very short half-life, so it's not a big deal, or they're very long half-life, in which case they're not at all dangerous (the longer the half-life, the less energetic the decay process is - e.g. Iodine-131 has a half-life of 8 days, and if you ingest too much it might give you thyroid cancer, Iodine-129 has a half life of 16 million years, ingesting it would have close to zero effect), overall these represent a small fraction of the overall waste too.
  7. Utter nonsense, you don't seem to have a clue here. For a start trade deals don't take away American jobs, they create jobs. And protectionism is a common policy for Trump and much of the left (including Bernie, and now Warren too, another policy she's nicked off him to try and pilfer his votes). Centrists are pro-trade deals, and so opposed to Trump, Sanders and Warren's positions on trade. Trade deals good. On other economic matters though centrist dems are far more closely aligned with Sanders than Trump, and on areas where they disagree they'd be far more likely to compromise than they would with the Republicans or with Trump himself, even for no other reason than partisanship. Really your comment was staggeringly dumb. I know it's in-fashion now to dunk on centrists, but come on... Bernie is relatively hawkish himself too (he's not like Corbyn, fuelled by hatred for western liberal democracy into supporting it's various enemies, or a cynical appeaser of despots like Tulsi Gabbard). He does support big cuts to the military budget, which puts him apart from most other democrats, not just centrists; but that would be a big vote loser in the general election, and it would be very hard to get through congress. The most he could hope for is preventing increases, and maybe a few targeted cuts. But when it came to voting for military action or other assertive foreign policy positions (sanctions, etc), he usually votes with the majority, the Iraq war being the obvious exception (along with most Democrats, centrist or not). Cutting the military budget is a great idea btw, just saying it'll be hard to accomplish. Yang has an interesting proposal here, rather than just make loads of cuts, put the spending to better use, e.g. with the military taking a bigger part in infrastructure development, this would be a lot easier to achieve because it wouldn't face the same level of pork-barrel related opposition. Trump's actually doing pretty well on the wall now, despite being successfully blocked in getting it directly funded. It wasn't that he wasn't trying hard, he was just being prevented from doing it. He's managed to take some of the Pentagon budget now though - ultimately as much as he wants really, and attempts to block that have failed, so construction is ramping up. Well in that case your priorities are wrong, very wrong.
  8. It think it was more that all the people that were going to die had died already. The following uptick coincided with a lot of war too, which is the main driver of famine (I think all of the current famines in the world today are due to war).
  9. the alternatives result in people being compelled to work really hard at doing things that are bad for humanity because they're controlled by human beings who are generally terrible at doing things that are good for humanity, due to the inherent hubris and greed of human beings, in fact it's generally worse to let them have too much control, which is why capitalism is generally far less harmful.
  10. there will never be any long term nuclear waste storage, it'll all get reprocessed at some point.
  11. honestly, even the fancier new reactor designs aren't needed. the current 3rd generation PWRs are all we really need for now. there's a bunch of them currently being built around the world, but that number needs to be about 10 times greater for a start. it's a demonstrated fact that you can decarbonise an entire country with this tech, it's been done before, it didn't take forever, it wasn't dangerous, and it wasn't cost prohibitive - most of the economic barriers are artificial and can be fixed by policy, which is why it's important politicians take this stuff seriously. the newer designs, the molten salt reactors (using thorium or not), or even the fancier pebble bed reactors, are great too, and we should be definitely be working on them, but waiting on them will just lead to more delays. it's also important to have modular designs, especially so high-tech countries can churn them out and sell them to developing countries (especially smaller countries where building even one normal sized reactor might be too much juice for the grid). there are also a bunch of upgrades which work with the 3rd gen existing designs, which improve safety (using different fuel mixes and other cladding materials for the fuel rods for example) and which can be used to increase the longevity of existing plants, which is a lot cheaper than building replacement plants.
  12. Last I checked there was no mention of nuclear on her website, but in that town hall climate debate earlier this month she announced her plan was to phase out all nuclear and replace it with renewables by 2035. Now even if this was possible (it's not), it would still be incredibly stupid, because you could instead replace lots of coal power with renewables instead. Now one possible thing here is that because it's such an idiotic policy, it'll be obvious early on it's going to fail and maybe she'd be able to backtrack somewhat; but even then it's likely all her eggs will be in a renewables basket so it would just lead to big delays decarbonising. Maybe it's just a cynical attempt on her part to court Sanders voters? It's not an issue she's been vocal on before and she seems willing to steal other candidates policies when it suits her.
  13. ...also, all of his economic policies are capitalist.
  14. This is an incredibly silly thing to say. Bernie keeps calling himself a democratic socialist, which might scare the people who watch Fox news, but really he's just a pretty mainstream European style social democrat, he's a capitalist at the end of the day not a socialist. The rest of the democrats are on the same page as him on most issues, and they'd probably be able to compromise pretty easily on the others. Warren has better versions of most Sanders policies, but there's not a huge difference between most of the big ones. She also has more chance of getting them through congress I would have thought, with the exception of the medicare plan, a public option or something like that would be a better plan, and would work better in the general election because it would require far less tax increases. Neither of them are fit for the job though, as they both plan on shutting down nuclear power in favor of a renewables only strategy (and not just focusing on new renewables, but shutting down existing nuclear, which is complete idiocy). This really should rule them out for anyone who thinks climate change is a big priority. This makes even Biden a better candidate, and he's terrible. Brooker and Yang have been the best and most vocal on this issue. It's a shame though, I'd have been happy with Warren if it wasn't for the nuclear thing, she had been sitting on the fence on that issue for ages. She also has some other dumb ideas too, like breaking up the big tech companies, and she's been talking up protectionism too. Yang has a lot of interesting ideas (his VAT idea is probably the best one, not even the UBI), plus some silly ones, but it's all academic really as he doesn't have a chance. Hopefully he at least sticks around til the end, as he'll have a positive effect on the debate at least, he should run for Senate or Governor next, he might have a real chance in the future.
  15. not really https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/famine/ It'll probably start happening again in 50 or so years if we don't do anything about climate change now, but at least mass starvation is not one of our current problems.
  16. It definitely is, they can do what they want. Especially when the film isn't a biopic, but even then, they rarely stick to the facts.
  17. caze

    Brexit :(

    brexit party have more chance of splitting the conservative vote than winning seats, they might get a couple, but with FPTP they're not going to win many. I think Swinson has done well, she just won a poll of Labour voters (ppl who voted for them in 2017) who said they prefer her to Corbyn.
  18. caze

    Brexit :(

    Labour are likely to lose loads of seats in the next election. I think it would be a bit of a stretch for the Lib Dems to overtake them into 2nd place, but given recent polling and the last local and european elections, plus winning that Tory by-election, it's not impossible. either way, Labour will do poorly, hopefully so poorly Labour finally see sense and bin Corbyn. Labour membership peaked a couple of years ago and has gone into decline, it looks like even the Momentum types are losing faith in Corbyn at this stage.
  19. caze

    Brexit :(

    oh, sure. but it's still dumb, you retain most of the benefits of being in the EU, without having any democratic say on how it's run, might as well just stay in the EU instead. you don't really gain much with a soft brexit, it's pointless.
  20. caze

    Brexit :(

    quite possibly, Labour's ideas about a brexit agreement are as silly as the Conservative's. They both want to be outside of the single market and customs union (Labour say they want a customs union, not the customs union, but that would still require border checks), and you can't have that without tearing up the GF agreement (unless there's some backup plan like the backstop to provide legal certainty). So it's either no deal, or a very soft brexit nobody wants because it gives none of the benefits of leaving the EU, and doesn't give the UK any say on how the EU operates.
  21. https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1169664123745054727
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