2020 US Election

[ignatius]

These people need a sit down with bill gates to discuss newer safer better nuclear technologies. He’s been pushing nuclear option and trying to get that ball rolling quite seriously. The trade war with China put the brakes on the plant they were going to build there as an example of modern nuclear. Hopefully someone makes these candidates watch “the nuclear option” doc on Netflix.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[caze]

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.

[zlemflolia]

obligatory nuclear semiotics wikipedia page mention. its one of the coolest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages

[caze]

there will never be any long term nuclear waste storage, it'll all get reprocessed at some point.

[Brisbot]

17 hours ago, caze said:

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.

 

The centrist dems are economically closer aligned with Trump and the republicans economically than they are with Bernie, which is clear from their voting record as they vote/agree with him when it comes to the shitty trade deals that take jobs away from Americans, the hawkish military budget increase, etc. Yeah they disagree with him on the wall... which he isn't trying that hard to make a reality anyway.

They also love their legal bribes, which Bernie is for getting rid of. That is reason alone to want Trump as president more than Bernie. It's also evident from the establishment controlled media who criticizes Trump more often for stupid crap he says than actual policy substance, and then they slander Bernie for "being a socialist" even though he is a capitalist. It's because they agree with what the republicans are doing economically, and that is the bottom line.

Yes, Bernie is still a capitalist, just a more 'human centered capitalist' as Yang likes to say, and basically where I am in terms of belief. And yes he is a social democrat going by European standards and not America's wonky standards (we are in our own world it feels like sometimes).

The reality is the rich own both parties because of legal bribery and this is why they would rather have Trump as their president than Bernie. Trump still upholds the status quo plus some extra conservatism, Bernie would at least try to make the legal bribery illegal, if he is true to his word. Who knows if he could accomplish it though. I'd still rather have him as pres even if he can only accomplish an eighth of his campaign promises as I don't actually expect him to accomplish everything he says he wants.

And In terms of killing off nuclear energy, IDK. I haven't really read up on that to have an opinion. My number 1 issue is getting rid of the $200,000 speeches politicians give so politicians will do what people want and not what the mega rich want. 
 

Edited September 25, 2019 by Brisbot

[Rubin Farr]

I think Harris will be the go to VP candidate among Dems.  She's polling at like 4% but still seems to have money?  Biden could possibly win w/ her, but she made him eat shit in that one debate.  Warren is pulling ahead, but two females on a ticket I think is still reaching in 2019.  The male focused conservative apparatus would have a field day calling them lesbian socialists or whatever lame put down they think is funny.

[caze]

23 hours ago, Brisbot said:

The centrist dems are economically closer aligned with Trump and the republicans economically than they are with Bernie, which is clear from their voting record as they vote/agree with him when it comes to the shitty trade deals that take jobs away from Americans, the hawkish military budget increase, etc. Yeah they disagree with him on the wall... which he isn't trying that hard to make a reality anyway.

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.

23 hours ago, Brisbot said:

And In terms of killing off nuclear energy, IDK. I haven't really read up on that to have an opinion. My number 1 issue is getting rid of the $200,000 speeches politicians give so politicians will do what people want and not what the mega rich want. 

Well in that case your priorities are wrong, very wrong.

Edited September 26, 2019 by caze

[may be rude]

Wall Street Democratic donors warn the party: We’ll sit out, or back Trump, if you nominate Elizabeth Warren

 

wall street is afraid of warren. 

[goDel]

12 minutes ago, very honest said:

Wall Street Democratic donors warn the party: We’ll sit out, or back Trump, if you nominate Elizabeth Warren

 

wall street is afraid of warren. 

Interesting. 

In the end though, this sounds more like a toothless threat. If she wins the primary, they'll be looking for ways to influence her. And that's by supporting her with money. Usually. Similar to how they ended up supporting Trump in 2016 despite their objections earlier on.

Or in other words, they're trying to influence the Dems to support someone else, but in the end it wouldn't matter and they'd support her anyways. If only because they hope they can buy influence. They might invest a little less, but who cares. Trump is working hard to energise the anti-Trump base.

Edited September 26, 2019 by goDel

[may be rude]

1 hour ago, goDel said:

Interesting. 

In the end though, this sounds more like a toothless threat. If she wins the primary, they'll be looking for ways to influence her. And that's by supporting her with money. Usually. Similar to how they ended up supporting Trump in 2016 despite their objections earlier on.

Or in other words, they're trying to influence the Dems to support someone else, but in the end it wouldn't matter and they'd support her anyways. If only because they hope they can buy influence. They might invest a little less, but who cares. Trump is working hard to energise the anti-Trump base.

 

the warren campaign doesn't accept corporate donations. 

 

but yeah, wall street is trying to dissuade the party from getting behind her. because they see that it might be close.

Edited September 26, 2019 by very honest

[goDel]

I guess I was making a broader point. Influencing politics is not just through financing single campaigns, btw. Like specifically Warrens campaign. I mean, it's not that Wallstr will be putting money in a single basket. They're investing through all kinds of baskets. On different levels. And opposite sides of the isle. Money is rarely ideological. Or principal even. It's pragmatic. (edit: rather opportunistic)

Edited September 26, 2019 by goDel

[cooliofranco]

On 9/25/2019 at 3:05 AM, caze said:

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.

I've seen that proponents of nuclear are not factoring cost of long term storage of waste at all. It's safer that coal, but storage can be very costly and of course there is always the possibility of the storage going wrong in some terrible way. 

I'm not joking when I say we should figure out a way to shoot our waste into the sun. Space elevator? I'm sure this is actually a terrible idea that puts everyone and everything at grave risk.

[Brisbot]

4 hours ago, caze said:

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.

You'd probably do better convincing people of things if you didn't start every post with an insult lol. It's like you're preemptively doing it because you think the other guy will. Instead it just turns me off of even wanting to read what you have to say. 

Edited September 26, 2019 by Brisbot

[caze]

58 minutes ago, cooliofranco said:

I've seen that proponents of nuclear are not factoring cost of long term storage of waste at all. It's safer that coal, but storage can be very costly and of course there is always the possibility of the storage going wrong in some terrible way. 

I'm not joking when I say we should figure out a way to shoot our waste into the sun. Space elevator? I'm sure this is actually a terrible idea that puts everyone and everything at grave risk.

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.

[caze]

47 minutes ago, Brisbot said:

You'd probably do better convincing people of things if you didn't start every post with an insult lol. It's like you're preemptively doing it because you think the other guy will. Instead it just turns me off of even wanting to read what you have to say. 

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.

[cooliofranco]

55 minutes ago, caze said:

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.

yeah i mean, i certainly know less about the waste than you do apparently, thanks for the explanation. so it sounds like, like so many things, it comes down to the politics and messaging- getting people comfortable with the waste in a mountain near them, making sure they understand it's safe and inaccessible, etc etc

[caze]

26 minutes ago, cooliofranco said:

yeah i mean, i certainly know less about the waste than you do apparently, thanks for the explanation. so it sounds like, like so many things, it comes down to the politics and messaging- getting people comfortable with the waste in a mountain near them, making sure they understand it's safe and inaccessible, etc etc

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.

Edited September 27, 2019 by caze

[goDel]

5 hours ago, caze said:

NIMBYism

Had to look that up. 

Gotta admit I don't want a windmill in my backyard though...

/nimby out ;D

[may be rude]

here's warren v zuck for you guys

 

 

[chenGOD]

^^^ speaking of digital rights:

Yang Proposes Digital Data be Personal Property

[Nebraska]

5 hours ago, chenGOD said:

^^^ speaking of digital rights:

Yang Proposes Digital Data be Personal Property

personally, i think this would open up a pandoras box of legal complications- especially considering people cannot even figure out basic opsec to maintaining privacy. it's one of those things that sounds good in theory like random 'give 10 people $1000 for 1 year' plan

also- zuckerberg would just add him on his 'to sue' list

Edited October 1, 2019 by Nebraska

[Nebraska]

Quote

WASHINGTON — The Oval Office meeting this past March began, as so many had, with President Trump fuming about migrants. But this time he had a solution. As White House advisers listened astonished, he ordered them to shut down the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico — by noon the next day.

Ms. Nielsen had tried reasoning with the president on many occasions. When she stood up to him during a cabinet meeting the previous spring, he excoriated her and she almost resigned.

We can close the border, she told the president, but it’s not going to fix anything. People will still be permitted to claim asylum.

“Kirstjen, you didn’t hear me the first time, honey,” Mr. Trump said, according to two people familiar with the conversation. “Shoot ’em down. Sweetheart, just shoot ’em out of the sky, O.K.?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-border-wars.html

why not just make that whole area radioactive? bet nobody would go near it then

[chenGOD]

2 hours ago, Nebraska said:

personally, i think this would open up a pandoras box of legal complications- especially considering people cannot even figure out basic opsec to maintaining privacy. it's one of those things that sounds good in theory like random 'give 10 people $1000 for 1 year' plan

also- zuckerberg would just add him on his 'to sue' list

Respectfully disagree. Europe has much more stringent laws and regulations around digital privacy. 

It shouldn’t be on people to “figure out opsec to maintain privacy”. That should be a fundamental right in this age of information. 

[Nebraska]

43 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

Respectfully disagree. Europe has much more stringent laws and regulations around digital privacy. 

It shouldn’t be on people to “figure out opsec to maintain privacy”. That should be a fundamental right in this age of information. 

if yang made privacy a fundamental right, would you trust him that your data would be private? 

[caze]

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.