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Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

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Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#71

Post by School-Cotton »

mrfusion wrote: post #63
decebalus1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally the person who claims something needs to provide the data to back it up. My father-in-law doesn't believe that the moon landings took place. All the data in the world cannot convince him otherwise. The only good strategy in the face of these types of claims is to go up the crazy scale. For example when he tells me that the moon landings didn't happen, I tell him he's naive it he thinks the moon exists. The mo…

Does that strategy work?

For what definition of "work" ?

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#72

Post by bzbarsky »

obpacheco wrote: post #68
bzbarsky wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go to Three Mile Island just fine as long as you don't go inside the Unit 2 containment vessel itself. The meltdown was fully contained inside said containment vessel. Unit 2 has since had its core removed from the site entirely and has had its electrical generator moved to another reactor (in North Carolina), so it's not like people haven't been going in it either. Unit 1 (the other reactor right next to the…

I admit a little bit of that is pessimism from what happened at Fukushima from when the plant lost power to run the cooling pumps. from Scientific American > Pushing water past the core means pumps that are generally run by electricity. What happens when a reactor gets disconnected from the grid? There are emergency diesel generators. You also have a battery system to keep instruments running, but that can also provi…

Right, at Fukushima it wasn't just loss of power that was the problem, it was the loss of all the backup power sources too, _combined_ with a design that required power to operate the cooling system.

I agree that this is something we should be keeping in mind as we build new reactors. And people have in fact kept it in mind. Modern reactor designs use passive cooling systems that don't need power to operate properly.

The single best thing we could do for nuclear safety, including from extreme space weather effects, is replace decades-old plants with modern ones. Unfortunately, people tend to react to that with "we shouldn't build any new nuclear plants, even if we're replacing old and less safe ones".

Just to put this in perspective, the first ever commercial nuclear plant was opened in 1956. Fukushima construction began in 1967, finished in 1971, 40 years before the meltdown. We've learned a good bit about safety in reactor design in the 50+ years that have passed since Fukushima was designed...

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#73

Post by profalseidol »

Retric wrote: post #29
EGreg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think China with all that control over businesses and their population could prevent people from polluting their rivers with plastic and spewing it into the Pacific Ocean!

Systemic corruption makes the rule of law "difficult" to enforce. And by difficult I mean this is a feature not a bug for the huge interconnected web of power that actually runs the country. PS: The fact China is not a democracy which has some unpleasant results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Pretty sure even "democratic" countries has so much difficulty with corruption. Then there is the Federal Reserve..

My true definition of democracy is direct democracy. Once you start giving power to a representative then you stop being democratic. And that includes power to survive, eat, have shelter, have vacation, have time to study and pursue creative things.

But unless we can instantly communicate like the Protoss can then no, we can't achieve 'rule by the people'. However, it's not simply a choice of Direct Democracy, 3-branch system, 1-party system. We can have system where there is way less concentrated power (again, emphasis on power including many things like education in critical thinking).

Having said that. Yes China is not a democracy. Nor any other country. It is a question of how power (again, my emphasis) is concentrated and the potential of corruption.

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#74

Post by [deleted] »

mohaine wrote: post #7

Ok, now that refrigerates are ozone safe can we get all the regulations removed from them? At least for the safe ones? Right now if you don't reclaim the R-134A from your car AC or fridge it is a $27k fine while you can buy cans of it to blow out your keyboard. Same goes for propane. This makes the new fridges that use propane almost impossible to work on since nobody has the reclamation equipment for R290.

[deleted]

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#75

Post by onetimemanytime »

Retric wrote: post #29
EGreg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think China with all that control over businesses and their population could prevent people from polluting their rivers with plastic and spewing it into the Pacific Ocean!

Systemic corruption makes the rule of law "difficult" to enforce. And by difficult I mean this is a feature not a bug for the huge interconnected web of power that actually runs the country. PS: The fact China is not a democracy which has some unpleasant results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

The other side is true as well. The Boss of Bosses can get a call from Trump and that factory owner is arrested in 15 minutes.

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#76

Post by hexane360 »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #65
obpacheco wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I would call that a good alternative. How many places on the Earth can you no longer go due to radiation? Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island and the list will go on. Also it seams very short sided in terms of planning for out of control cosmic events such as asteroids or coronal mass ejections which could wipe out our grid, leading to nuclear leaks worldwide. If we were to get something like the…

> wipe out our grid, leading to nuclear leaks worldwide. I don’t understand how nuclear leaks could be a result of grid failure. Also, I read recently that CME could cause DC charge to occur on very long power lines, but that modern systems can handle this. There was a HN thread about this couple days ago, can anyone find it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18379734

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#77

Post by hexane360 »

xavierstein wrote: post #24

My father-in-law firmly believes that the hole in the ozone was caused by space shuttle reentry, and that's why it's patching now, and also that CFCs couldn't possibly make the hole because they are heavier than air. Does anyone have the data to refute these claims?

Gases have a thermodynamic tendency to mix, despite weight differences. The atmosphere isn't a layer cake of heavy gases below light gases. If it was, we wouldn't be able to breathe because the ~1% of argon (and all the heavier gases) would sit below the oxygen layer.

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#78

Post by Joakal »

roywiggins wrote: post #57
Joakal wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is a democracy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China Funny thing is, people say one party system is not a democracy. What about USA's two party system? Both of them have representatives elected by people (baring the violence). But in both, people can't realistically get a new party in government, let alone run the country. Yet new parties get elected in other parts of the world, even if they don't…

Our parties change around every half century or so. The US has gone through several rearrangements of parties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Party_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Party_System We're arguably currently on the sixth one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Party_System

That's not a fair comparsion as the current Chinese party has only been in power 'democratically' since 1949.

That said, my above point is about non ruling party representatives. In Europe, there tends to be more than 5 different parties, showing plenty of voter choice is possible.

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#79

Post by flukus »

mrfusion wrote: post #63
decebalus1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally the person who claims something needs to provide the data to back it up. My father-in-law doesn't believe that the moon landings took place. All the data in the world cannot convince him otherwise. The only good strategy in the face of these types of claims is to go up the crazy scale. For example when he tells me that the moon landings didn't happen, I tell him he's naive it he thinks the moon exists. The mo…

Does that strategy work?

Considering the amount of "moon hoaxer" videos on youtube (no I'm not joking, go look) I think it might be counter-productive.

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#80

Post by apatters »

profalseidol wrote: post #73
Retric wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systemic corruption makes the rule of law "difficult" to enforce. And by difficult I mean this is a feature not a bug for the huge interconnected web of power that actually runs the country. PS: The fact China is not a democracy which has some unpleasant results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Pretty sure even "democratic" countries has so much difficulty with corruption. Then there is the Federal Reserve.. My true definition of democracy is direct democracy. Once you start giving power to a representative then you stop being democratic. And that includes power to survive, eat, have shelter, have vacation, have time to study and pursue creative things. But unless we can instantly communicate like the Proto…

In the United States, the Founding Fathers debated the idea of direct democracy at length and rejected it. Their reasons included preserving state sovereignty/local governance, and protecting rural minorities. Here's an article by George Friedman at Stratfor which serves as an introduction to the discussion: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_13051196

The only thing which can reliably be said about modern debate on how to structure a good representative government, is that the participants are rarely informed about the 500 years of debate on the subject that occurred before they were born

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