GAO: DOE Is Prematurely Excluding Less Expensive Options for Nuclear Cleanup

> I mean I might not know what a strawman is, but I thought it was claiming people were making an argument that in fact they were not.

What I mean is: I expect you originally heard a version of this that was more nuanced and supported by data than what you presented. Your paraphrased form is weaker, which I call a strawman. (The "duh, QED" was kind of a give-away.)

Wikipedia lists (among other things) "Oversimplifying an opponent's argument, then attacking this oversimplified version." and "Exaggerating (sometimes grossly) an opponent's argument, then attacking this exaggerated version." as characteristics of a strawman.

btw the opposite is sometimes called a "steelman": arguing against the most solid version of the opponent's argument that you can imagine.

> I mean, sure. I've long argued that the US strategy of printing money and giving it to asset owners is bad. I doubt a wealth tax would help, IMO the real issue is the welfare for wealthy people. Seems kinda dumb and the people claiming that the economy would collapse without it appear to be making up their principles as they go along.

As in Quantitative Easing? I confess I don't understand it as well as I probably should, but I think it's cyclical? and inequality is increasing even when it is not happening? Would a pinky-promise that we will stop and never do it again achieve start reducing inequality, as opposed to just lessening the increase? If not, I don't think that's radical enough on its own. What serious alternative is there to a wealth tax or going back to 70+% highest marginal tax rate?

> But we should all want to encourage wealth. It makes people wealthy.

To the extent anyone and everyone can become wealthy, I agree. What policies would you suggest to achieve that meaningfully (obviously inflation doesn't count)? What I see in these charts is instead a zero-sum game in which the most wealthy become even more so at the expense of the least wealthy.

> It is a complex answer, and heavily depends on decay product chemistry.

The source you provided does not agree with that assessment. It is purely radiation damage. The Pu-238 (half life 87.7 years) and Pu-239 (half-life 24,110 years) experiments.

    plutonium-induced health effects are considered to be the result of energy deposited by alpha particle emissions in tissues that retain plutonium for extended periods (i.e., lung, bone, liver following inhalation exposure). Similar health effects would be expected from any alpha-emitting source that would result in similar cumulative tissue-specific radiation dose and dose rate.

They seem fairly certain that it is alpha particle damage, not chemistry.

The toxicology of soluble heavy-metal bioavailable material is a well understood area of research, and can bioaccumulate in humans several times higher than background if a food chain allows biomagnification of a contaminant. The publication assumes the reader has first year biology, and will understand test subject mortality data implications.

I would recommend studying the story of Polychlorinated biphenyls in whales, Mercury levels in salmon, and PFAS in the Veritasium hosts blood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY

"Particle Accelerator vs Egg" is a great demonstration of purely irradiated cell decomposition, and is great entertainment for all ages. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CiLov03IX4

1. Uranium miners have high risk of lung cancer due to radon gas and decay products.

https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/research/canadian-...

2. Workers exposed to alpha-emitting materials like plutonium/uranium show increased risk of lung cancer

https://www.ovid.com/jnls/epidem/fulltext/10.1097/ede.000000...

3. Plant operators within heavily regulated work areas are usually unaffected, and show an odd statistical wellness anomaly inconsistent with control groups. However, if one includes accidents/events with collateral impact:

https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/health/health-effe...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...

4. Waste management incidents are difficult to quantify over 30000 year time scales. However, the industry has failed to even maintain containment for 30 years at some sites.

https://web.archive.org/web/20141129021716/http://www.katu.c...

>It would be illuminating to see what you find reasonable.

Cheap distributed sustainable infrastructure more robust against conflicts/regulatory-capture/arms-proliferation, and leave a light footprint for those yet to live here. Good luck, =3

> Isn't that fairly close to what we have now? I don't see any theoretical issues.

Massive concentration of wealth has a few outcomes you may find disagreeable or sub-optimal

* Huge concentration of power in smaller numbers of people, chosen for unrelated skills, heavily tied to luck

* People with huge amounts of power being able to make extremely sub-optimal decisions and still be entirely fine. Elon can buy and run a business into the ground on a whim and be entirely fine.

* Concentration of direction of human labour - it is more worthwhile to spend many lifetimes of humans to very slightly increase the comfort of one multi-billionaire.

For the last example, Americans earn more typically than anyone else in the world and data is easy to find. Assume lifetime earnings of $3M. Bezos' yacht cost more than enough for 100 full lifetimes of US median worker labour, and requires ten lifetimes every year to maintain.

For one ship, for one person.

You can look at that and say "this is optimal" but I am very unsure as to what you're then measuring.

> Obviously if we literally mean one person I don't think the market would pick that as an optimum outcome

Well it being a daft choice is rather the point, taking the absolute extremes is rarely a sensible approach. Total abolition of private wealth is not the point anyone is making. The argument people are making is to take money from those that have so much that the impact to their lives would be negligible, and use it to improve the lives of many others. It may even make them wealthier!

You said optimum there, but optimal for what? Even if it's just efficient allocation of capital, doesn't that rely on pressure to invest well? The reward for doing so is more wealth, but what if you don't need more, or don't need to constantly try and get more?

The wealthiest could sit with vast sums as cash and be fine, which is sensible for them but surely a terrible use of capital.

> the alternative is to have a relative small committee that, in practice, decides when to give and when to take away.

That's a government.

> Worst case is she gets angry and a bunch of people go hungry and uneducated,

Why would anyone go hungry and uneducated if Taylor Swift is angry? What is the process by which you see that happening?

> She's more effective with that donation than getting outcomes like educating 500 kids.

How do you figure that? And you can simply swap over fully educating those kids for something else if you want, unless the argument is that Taylor Swift specifically is better at allocating resources for whatever outcomes the population wants.

Let's take TS as an example. What is it she is being rewarded for, is it efficient allocation of capital? Is that why people buy her songs? Is that what's made her so incredibly wealthy?

Do you think that if she was rewarded somewhat less, that she'd stop making music? Stop touring?

In fact, imagine she never got more money. Do you think she's making music because she's saving up for something she cannot currently afford? Does she have a lifestyle that's unsustainable without earning even more money?

edit -

To be clear, I think the market is an incredible way of constructing a ludicrously large graph of how to use the worlds resources and human labour, tied to what people want as an outcome, allowing fractional voting through the network in a way that's extremely simple for end users (I buy things for prices I'm happy with, the "market" of millions of other people optimise the back end of that) and is self-optimising.

The problem comes when some people have enormously more votes than others, distorting it all, or are able to manipulate the graph, or where hill climbing optimisation cannot reach the more optimal states (infrastructure classically, legal systems are another good example).