Heading back to school for nuclear engineering myself in the next year or so, hopefully to make reactors completely self regulating.

Since no source is mentioned, I assume this to be your comment and therefore applaud and envy you. Most of my passion for a couple of things died somewhere along the way.

Questions, comments or concerns on nuclear or energy in this thread are always welcome (and encouraged!)

Meaningful questions would require a level of knowledge I do not possess, so I'll stick to the layman's reaction: a comment.

Two issues that are not exclusive to the use of nuclear technology make me a strong opponent of nuclear energy in general, aside from technology-specific problems. It's the involvement of people in every stage of the process and centralisation.

Anything run by private entities has to generate a profit. Therefore corners will be cut, regulations will be circumvented. Mistakes will be made, design flaws covered up. The cheapest material will be used by the least paid worker, supervised by a guy on his second job who just wants to go home to his family.

Case in point would be the reactors in Germany, one of the most stricly regulated and controlled markets in the world. Absurd levels of negligence and coverup after coverup have become public over the years, and that's before cost cutting measures became en vogue.

Or take the EPR Olkiluoto 3 in Finland. The reports on the construction process would be hysterically funny if it wasn't a bloody nuclear reactor they're working on.

Google some pictures of "Schachtanlage Asse" to see the reality of "due dilligence" in these matters. If people are involved, bean counters and politicians will run the show, fuck-ups and bad calls are inevitable.

Even if engineers call the shots, they'll overengineer it, they'll make it incompatible with real life conditions. We've seen it time and time again. I could tell you stories about the ICE train, for instance, that'll make your head spin. Incidently, the same company is also involved in the construction of nuclear power plants.

As for centralisation: if energy generation is focused on large scale power plants, it creates monopolies/oligopolies. If a handful corporations, or regionally even just a single corporation, controls the market for something as fundamental as energy, it turns all concepts of a market into a farce. Look at France where EDF basically owns every single plant. Or Germany, where Vattenfall, E.ON, RWE and EnBW control the grid, control the power plants, control the market, control the price, control the politics. It's madness.

Edit: Blimey! This was supposed to be a short comment, yet it turned into another incoherent rant. Sorry.

>> ^Jul210s:

These folks need desperately elocution lessons. Couldn't understand a word. Total failure.


I think that's the punk-country crossbreeding: twangy incoherence.

The Eden trilogy, Deathworld. I particularly like the last Bill title "The Final Incoherent Adventure".

This is true, Bob is unburdened with facts...life does get a lot simpler when you don't bother with evidence and critical thinking. Who cares if some colored folk get enslaved in the process. Who do they think they are wanting equal rights and drinking from OUR water fountains. What IS this world coming to?

And is it just me or is Bob's grammar getting worse? He's getting more and more incoherent.

>> ^bobknight33:

I find liberals are always first to pull the race card.
By their standards if you generalize then you are a raciest. Never mind life experiences or facts.

Your at a site the baths in liberalism and they will stab you if you even have thought other that theirs.

>> ^Chaucer:
>> ^VoodooV:
>> ^Chaucer:
It doesnt surprise me that they boo'd that' he'd repeal Obamacare. Most black people just want free shit at the expense of others.

I'm going to attempt to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you do realize that that was pretty much the definition of racism right?

Actually, that isnt racism as there is no hate there. Its just an observation that I have formed through my life experiences.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^bcglorf:
So the moral is, it is absolutely time to panic.
Not just maybe, but absolutely time to panic.
Fortunately, he IS overstating the situation. Right from the very start he declares how stable the last 10k years have been, and that the last 100 have already broken all records seen over those 10k years. Go use google scholar and read Michael Mann's recent work on reconstructing the last 2k years. Mann is one of the leading scientists arguing that it is time to panic and things are getting bad very fast. His research is publicly available on google scholar for everyone to go and read.
If you can be bothered to go and read that before shouting me down as a denier, you will find the following in his research. That there is at least some evidence that on at least two occasions over the last 2k years, climate HAS been as warm or warmer than current.
I'm not saying it's all roses and that there is nothing to see here. I AM saying that if you go read the actual research you'll find a much more nuanced and less panic stricken assortment of facts than what is presented in this video.

Can you post a link to the page your talking about? I used google scholar, but Mann has published quite a few papers and I really don't have time to read them all.
That said, even if I read the paper, I'm not confident I'd understand it fully. From my limited research into climatology, it's a reasonably complex science. My problem is that I don't really have time to study all the theory around this.
And frankly, I shouldn't have to. I'm not a climatologist. No-one alive today can possibly hope to understand all science in every field. That's why we specialise. With a small amount of ego, I'm willing to say that most climatologists are worse programmers than I am, but that's ok too, 'cos that's not their field.
What I'm trying to say in my trademark, rambling, incoherent way is that I generally accept a scientific consensus (assuming it's been properly peer reviewed and so on). Fallacy of majority? Possibly. I'm willing to accept the possibility that there's a gifted climatologist out there who is desperately trying to get the rest of them to understand the crucial theory/evidence/algorithm they've missed, and it's all going to be ok. Hell, I hope there is, but it seems unlikely to me.
To apply Occams razor: which makes more sense?


You can see Mann's latest work here. Just don't stop with reading the abstract where he declares the reinforcement of his previous studies and findings. Go further down and look at the reconstruction of the last 2k years the article was built on. The green EIV line is the 'newer' statistical method recommended to him by statisticians that claimed his previous method was biased towards 0(minimized highs and lows). You can clearly see the EIV reconstruction shows multiple peaks in the past. More importantly though, look at the last 100 years on the graph. The bold red line is the instrumental record. It blots out most of the last 100 years, but if you look closely, you can see that none of the reconstructed lines spike away into scary land like the instrumental record. In fact, none of the reconstructed lines climb above where the EIV line has peaked multiple times in the past. To me that screams the need to look harder still at the probability that our methods for reconstruction aren't sensitive enough to pick up a short spike like what we know from the instrumental record is currently taking place. That doesn't prove spikes like the last 100 years are common, but it DOES call into serious question the claim that it's never happened before in the last 2k years. That final claim is the vital and key point between everyone panic and lets study this further to understand it fully.

>> ^bcglorf:

So the moral is, it is absolutely time to panic.
Not just maybe, but absolutely time to panic.
Fortunately, he IS overstating the situation. Right from the very start he declares how stable the last 10k years have been, and that the last 100 have already broken all records seen over those 10k years. Go use google scholar and read Michael Mann's recent work on reconstructing the last 2k years. Mann is one of the leading scientists arguing that it is time to panic and things are getting bad very fast. His research is publicly available on google scholar for everyone to go and read.
If you can be bothered to go and read that before shouting me down as a denier, you will find the following in his research. That there is at least some evidence that on at least two occasions over the last 2k years, climate HAS been as warm or warmer than current.
I'm not saying it's all roses and that there is nothing to see here. I AM saying that if you go read the actual research you'll find a much more nuanced and less panic stricken assortment of facts than what is presented in this video.


Can you post a link to the page your talking about? I used google scholar, but Mann has published quite a few papers and I really don't have time to read them all.

That said, even if I read the paper, I'm not confident I'd understand it fully. From my limited research into climatology, it's a reasonably complex science. My problem is that I don't really have time to study all the theory around this.

And frankly, I shouldn't have to. I'm not a climatologist. No-one alive today can possibly hope to understand all science in every field. That's why we specialise. With a small amount of ego, I'm willing to say that most climatologists are worse programmers than I am, but that's ok too, 'cos that's not their field.

What I'm trying to say in my trademark, rambling, incoherent way is that I generally accept a scientific consensus (assuming it's been properly peer reviewed and so on). Fallacy of majority? Possibly. I'm willing to accept the possibility that there's a gifted climatologist out there who is desperately trying to get the rest of them to understand the crucial theory/evidence/algorithm they've missed, and it's all going to be ok. Hell, I hope there is, but it seems unlikely to me.

To apply Occams razor: which makes more sense?

>> ^quantumushroom:

This corrupt, incoherent decision goes way beyond socialized medicine.
This is what you need to take away from this: the Supreme Idiots have now given the federal mafia unlimited power. Fuck your health insurance or anything else, it does not matter because you are no longer free. The pigs can now penalize you for doing something they don't like, and "TAX" your dumb asses when you DON'T do something they command you to do.
We are no longer free, a message lost on whose who didn't give a damn about freedom to begin with. To you ninnyhammers still whining about "greed", we've only spent 9 trillion dollars on a failed "War on Poverty".
Why you lefties born in America (by accident) just don't up and move to Europe I'll never know. They already have a socialist paradise.


Wait, does this mean I can't legally smoke marijuana now?

This corrupt, incoherent decision goes way beyond socialized medicine.

This is what you need to take away from this: the Supreme Idiots have now given the federal mafia unlimited power. Fuck your health insurance or anything else, it does not matter because you are no longer free. The pigs can now penalize you for doing something they don't like, and "TAX" your dumb asses when you DON'T do something they command you to do.

We are no longer free, a message lost on whose who didn't give a damn about freedom to begin with. To you ninnyhammers still whining about "greed", we've only spent 9 trillion dollars on a failed "War on Poverty".

Why you lefties born in America (by accident) just don't up and move to Europe I'll never know. They already have a socialist paradise.

>> ^bobknight33:

So you are saying that this shit would have happened back in the 50's and 60's when society was more conservative? Sure the kids might have thought the things but would have the proper respect not to say shit.
Once again ignorant fools like you shame this community.
>> ^probie:
>> ^bobknight33:
This is another example of why Liberalism is totally wrong and destructive to society.

bobknight33, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.



You just proved to me and everyone else that you belong on that bus with the rest of the children.

So you are saying that this shit would have happened back in the 50's and 60's when society was more conservative? Sure the kids might have thought the things but would have the proper respect not to say shit.

Once again ignorant fools like you shame this community.
>> ^probie:

>> ^bobknight33:
This is another example of why Liberalism is totally wrong and destructive to society.

bobknight33, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

>> ^bobknight33:

This is another example of why Liberalism is totally wrong and destructive to society.


bobknight33, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

I don't know what your background is (?), but my colleagues and I have no trouble understanding what "aversive punishment" means. No incoherence, no confusion. It's one part of behaviourist principles that are taught in undergraduate psychology. It is often referred to as positive punishment.

Would you care to cite the relevant evidence that shows the effects are vanishingly small? Because punishment, from everything I have learned, is an excellent means of behaviour control -- it just has many drawbacks, which is why reinforcement is the preferred alternative. The problem is that there are severe cases where nothing else works. What then do you do?

Reductions in social skills, communication skills, and cognitive ability are all possible outcomes. However, every one of those will depend on the punisher used, its properties, the behaviour in question, and a large variety of other factors. Your brush paints thickly.

I'm not sure what to make of your last paragraph. It reeks of ad-hom.

>> ^RhesusMonk:

"Aversive punishment" is not a coherent term in the realm of emotional/behavioral psychology. What's more, the practice to which this term seems to refer has vanishingly small effect on "self-injurious" behavior (which is actually called self-stimulating behavior). What effects it may have are significantly offset by the reduction in social and communications skills, and a decrease in cognitive ability. These reasons are why, when aversive conditioning is used in the developmental setting, it is as a last resort and the aversive stimulus is sparing and lenient. In this case, the video and other evidence around the boy's condition and behavior are sparse, and any judgment whether this was the correct course of action based on the information we have is laughable. Great measures require great evidence in their justification.
In any event, cooling people off their outrage at authority who inflict barbaric emotional and physical pain in an effort to encourage compliance for its own sake with quasi-psychology based claims is sophomoric at best. There may be some intellectual satisfaction with the idea that some minds are so beyond reason that they only respond to pain of this kind, but that idea only smacks true when the thinker lacks the creativity necessary to actually manage these kinds of malfunctions. Seems Nurse Ratched would pass muster with at least some of our Sifters.

>> ^berticus:
The sad, cold truth of things is that there are some severely autistic children who engage in the most horrific self-injurious behaviour, and aversive punishment is the ONLY treatment (in conjunction with a broader treatment plan, naturally) that works. And yes, it DOES work.
I'm not talking about kids with minor problems. I mean the ones who will do things like smash their own face into the ground over and over until they lose so much blood they pass out. The ones who will, left to themselves, die.
Positive punishment is horrible. But, it's either that, or let these kids maim or kill themselves (or possibly others) through their behaviour.
(I make no comment regarding this specific incident, I just want you to know the issue is far more complicated than this mind-bite would have you believe.)

At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

I ran the video through Google Translate, this is roughly what the dog said:

"You bastard! I missed you so many! Where are you hiding for all this time? (incoherent barking) Where? Where? Don't hide again! I think you were dead! I don't smell you anywhere for so much time! Why do you smell like gunpowder smells?"

I swear the funniest bit in all of these videos is the guy shouting 'epic rap battles of history'. This one was funny, but there's something about his almost incoherent bellowing that just makes me giggle.