Woes of Wind Power

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Originally posted by Snrrub
What is fucked up about it? If one considers all costs associated with nuclear energy, from construction to plant maintenance to decommissioning and cleanup, nuclear is the cheapest way to produce electricity (except for coal). Add to that nuclear's excellent safety record, and we have an all-around winner.

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And as soon as we finally get off our butts and build a space elevator, it will finally be safe to carry the waste up into space and shoot it off into the sun.

Right now that isn't an option because one Challenger disaster would rain nuclear waste all over the place.

Nuclear power is definitely the future, imho.

Fusion is even better, but that's a whole other ball of wax.

This is looking pretty good:
http://www.covalentsolar.com/About_Us.html

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Originally posted by Aristotle
Fusion is even better, but that's a whole other ball of wax.

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I was watching a science show a while back and fusion came up. They said it was like 50 years out? I wouldn't have even thought such a thing technologically possible. Sure enough they are working on it.

I know this is a diversion, but I didn’t want to leave Ari’s claims unanswered. If someone feels it’s necessary, we could branch this off into another thread.
Originally posted by Aristotle
“(T)he problem with most green parties is they are actually communist parties hiding behind the "green" banner as a way to subvert society. That is why they aren't truly supportive of any real solutions. If we solve environmental problems, their smokescreen goes away”.
Originally posted by Malacasta
“The idea that communist parties would actually sabotage green advances in technology so that the greens groups wouldn't become redundant and leave the communists without a cover is one of the funniest things I've ever read.”
Originally posted by Aristotle
“Where did I say commies wanted to sabotage green advances? I never said anything of the sort.”
Comment by Malacasta
“That is why they aren't truly supportive of any real solutions. If we solve environmental problems, their smokescreen goes away”
I think my comment above is a reasonable interpretation of what you said here.

Originally posted by Malacasta
“As a person who has communist friends in Australia's main green group, let me categorically state that these groups are NOT fronts for communists.”
Originally posted by Aristotle
“LOL. Didn't you kinda sorta just make my point?”
Comment by Malacasta
dictionary.com says ‘front’ (in the context you are using it) means: “a person or thing that serves as a cover or disguise for some other activity, esp. one of a secret, disreputable, or illegal nature; a blind: The store was a front for foreign agents.”
Marxists are always involved in, and are members of grass roots movements such as gay groups, women’s groups, aboriginal rights groups, anti-war groups, environmental groups etc. They go into these groups saying “I’m a Marxist, here are the arguments Marxists make. This is why I think we should do this and not that”. As members they only have as many voting rights as any other person in a group, and only win arguments based on convincing people that they should try it their way. This is simply democratic, there is nothing being hidden, and there is no brainwashing going on. This sort of thing just doesn’t fit the definition of the word front. The anti-war groups we were involved in weren’t acting on Marxist orders, our caucuses would always accept and support the rules or dates or poster designs or demands or whatever other things these groups decide, marxists just can’t ride roughshod over people unless they want to get kicked out of the movement. Also, there are probably not more than a couple of thousand Marxists in the whole of America, and most of them have sectarian disagreements with each other, so it’s just not feasible that such a tiny number of activists could hijack all these movements. It just really doesn’t work that way.

Now when you look at groups like Greens electoral parties, or Unions, or parties such as the Labor party, which again all have Marxists in them, the idea that they are fronts is even less viable. These groups are huge (in comparison to grass root groups) with huge amounts of entrenched party members and funds from businesses that dwarf whatever piddly contributions a Marxist group can muster.

When you look at this document: http://www.gp.org/platform/2004/intro.html#998204
it’s certainly a hodgepodge of ideas from the squidgy left, but really, it isn’t a Marxist platform such as the SWP one here: http://www.swp.org.uk/where.php
The biggest Marxists tendencies in the world have a political interest in advertising their Marxist nature (and their particular group). They want people to know that it’s their Marxist politics that lead to the useful decisions when it comes to organizing movements. They have absolutely nothing to gain by hiding their true politics.

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Originally posted by Aristotle
And as soon as we finally get off our butts and build a space elevator, it will finally be safe to carry the waste up into space and shoot it off into the sun.

Right now that isn't an option because one Challenger disaster would rain nuclear waste all over the place.

Nuclear power is definitely the future, imho.

Fusion is even better, but that's a whole other ball of wax.

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Well... the Challenger disaster was on re-entry. Dumping stuff into the sun would be done with unmanned, single-use vessels, so there's a lot less chance of that. It'd be very interesting to know what happens afterwards, though. If you apply the sun to a stick of uranium (tempered) (glimmering), would the massive heat disintegrate it? Or would the sun just melt off the shielding, resulting in strange radiation mixing in with our sunlight?

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Originally posted by Savaric
I was watching a science show a while back and fusion came up. They said it was like 50 years out? I wouldn't have even thought such a thing technologically possible. Sure enough they are working on it.

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Fusion BOMBS have been around since the early 1950s. The development started in the late 40s, I think. Using it for electrical power is harder; most bombs, at least the early ones, are triggered by fission reactions, and are just another way to get a boom (say it with me, folks, Jamie wants big boom!). To get electricity requires control and precision. I think it's quite probably the future of electrical generation, but it's not the present.

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Originally posted by Aristotle
The communist movement has gone underground and has infiltrated most of the "Green" parties worldwide. The US Green Party had as one of its main platform elements a 100% tax on all income over 5 or 10 times minimum wage. That's just one example.

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Bwark. How can they possibly boast that? Got a link to where they said it? That is pretty blatantly (a) communist, and (b) stupid.

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Originally posted by Rosuav
Bwark. How can they possibly boast that? Got a link to where they said it? That is pretty blatantly (a) communist, and (b) stupid.

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Let this be a lesson to me. Use Google before posting a question. This wasn't some obscure quote from somebody's speech...

http://www.greenparty.org/Platform.php
(I must confess, seeing "platform" and "php" together gets me thinking on completely different lines, but anyway)

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Progressive and Ecological Taxes
-- heavily snipped for brevity --
# Simple, Progressive Income Taxes: personal income tax ... income tax credit for each dependent to replace and fully compensate for the current exemptions and deductions that benefit to the average taxpayer...
# Eliminate Regressive Payroll Taxes: Fund Social Security, Health Care, Unemployment Insurance, and Workers Compensation out of progressive income and wealth taxes.
# Guaranteed Adequate Income: Build taxable Basic Income Grants into the progressive income tax structure to create a Universal Social Security system that ensures everyone has income for at least a modest standard of living above the poverty line.
# Maximum Income: Build into the progressive income tax a 100% tax on all income over ten times the minimum wage.
# Ecological and Feminist Economic Accounting: Expand the Bureau of Labor Statistics ... identify the true costs of resource depletion and pollution and hence appropriate eco-taxes to internalize full costs. ... establishing the average labor time required for each product. These labor time values will serve as shadow prices against which to judge the fairness of actual market prices.

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So, here's what I see happening if they achieve all this:
1) Much higher taxes, and lots more bureaucrats ("Expand the Bureau of %*" will probably occur a lot)
2) Everyone who earns more than 10 minimum wages will immediately renegotiate to get 9.99 times.
3) Everyone who earns barely more than the minimum wage will stop working, as they can take advantage of a guaranteed income.

Incidentally, what's with the "Feminist Accounting"? I can't find it in the original paragraph. What's feminist about it?

Some other things from elsewhere in the page:

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Labor Law Reforms
-- among other things --
# Double-Time Pay for All Overtime
# Prohibit Mandatory Overtime
# 6 Weeks Paid Vacation Annually in addition to Federal Holidays
# 1 Year Paid Educational Leave for Every 7 Years Worked
# 1 Year Parental Leave for Each Child Born with No Loss of Seniority
# Right to Work Short Hours: No discrimination in pay and promotion against workers who choose to work short hours.

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In other words, they want to let people work less and get paid more. (A whole year of paid leave every seven years? Assuming you don't job-hop, that's equivalent to a day off every week and a half, or an additional six weeks' paid leave a year. Putting all their vacation time together, it works out to (across eight years - seven worked and one of paid leave - assuming no parental leave):

2922 days (that's 365 days a year, and there'll be 2 leap years in eight years)
417 Saturdays and 417 Sundays leaves 2088 weekdays
70 federal holidays (ten a year) leaves 2018
210 paid vacation days leaves 1808
226 days (one eighth of 1808) paid educational leave

1582 actual days worked. That means, in effect, you work less than 4 days a week - and get paid for full-time work. (4 days a week, no holidays, would be 1669 days worked in 8 years.)

Earlier in the page it says:

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An Economic Bill of Rights
# 30-Hour Work Week: A 6-hour day with no cut in pay for the bottom 80% of the pay scale.
# Social Dividends: A "second paycheck" for workers enabling them to receive 40 hours pay for 30 hours work. Paid by the government out of progressive taxes so that social productivity gains are shared equitably.

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So not only do you work 4 days a week, effectively, you only work 6 hours a day. So in theory you work 23.73 hours a week and get paid for 40. What's the betting that people won't be happy with that, after a while, and will complain that Mondays are so terrible, and we need to take them all out - but not get paid any less?

Impressive. But moving on.

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Revitalize Public Education
# Children's Health: Clinics in all schools to check eyes, teeth, and general health at all grade levels. Healthy food at breakfast, lunch, and after school programs.

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We'll feed you what's good for you. You can't trust your parents to know what's good, how would they know?

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Free, Diverse and Uncensored Media
# Real Public Broadcasting: Complete public funding for real public radio and television broadcasting, with no advertising or grants from private corporations or foundations.
# Regulate Public Airwaves in the Public Interest: ... 6 prime-time hours a day of commercial broadcast time on each station for ... ad-free children's and news/public affairs programming. Fund by charging commercial broadcasters rents for the bandwidths they use, a tax on sales of commercial stations, and a tax on advertising. ... Free time for all candidates for public office.

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Control. It's all about control.

The classically "green" policies only make up two of the many sections: "Ecological Conversion" and "Sustainable Agriculture". The rest of the platform is all socialistic/communistic stuff. And some of it is pretty impressive... they want every company with over 10 employees to elect its own managers, and for any firm with more than 10% marketshare to be broken up (unless it appeals every 5 years). I don't know how narrowly they'd define a "market", because it's at times unfair to deem two companies to be in the same market (for instance, both McDonalds and the most posh restaurant in town are in the food business, but it'd be insulting to lump them together), and there are times when two companies actually ARE competing, but they can claim not to be (such as Toll and FCL - Toll had other parts to the business beside what was in direct competition with FCL, so they were deemed not to be in a monopoly position by buying them out).

Control. A socialist government wants to take everything under its own control. A truly democratic government leaves things in the hands of the people. Of course, genuine democracy is highly impractical, and isn't always the best thing, but I sure would prefer it to a government of Greens Party USA.

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Originally posted by Rosuav
Well... the Challenger disaster was on re-entry.

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No, it was on launch. I realize you may not have been born yet (or barely born) so I'll cut you some slack. :) I was watching it live on TV at the time.

There have been occasionally explosions with other launches into space as well. Until we have a space elevator, I doubt we will ever risk launching our nuclear waste into space.

Re the Green Party: Yeah, like I said, total communists. And that's not the exception, that's the rule. As I noted earlier, it is a major reason one of the founders of Greenpeace had to sever ties with the organization.

When there are environmental marches in your area, take a close look at associated groups who often put up the funding. More often than not it will be some type of communist "Workers of the World Unite" type organization.

Commies totally lost the battle of ideas, so now they had to go underground and achieve their end of government control through a more palatable means: environmental activism. People like clean air, fresh water, and green trees. So it is easy to confuse them with those things (which are good things) and hope they ignore the jack booted destroyers of the individual that the commies really want to bring to your door.

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Originally posted by Rosuav
You don't seriously mean that wind and solar power cost 50c/kWh? That can't be right, surely?

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Yes, I meant 50c/kWh, and it surely is correct. Government subsidies are the only reason why it appears affordable.