Global overpopulation

[Speaker to Animals]

It's also fucking dumb because it puts all your eggs in one basket in terms of risk. It's not amazing; it's fucking stupid to carry that much risk.

The track record proves you wrong, the dam is like 85 years old! You literally sound like someone afraid to fly "because of the risk".

Taleb is brilliant, except when he's dead wrong. His whole thing is build on it. There's no guarantee he'll ever be right. A lot of smart people think he's an idiot.

You are not listening to what I am telling you.

The track record before every disaster looks great. What was the track record before Fukushima?

You don't understand risk. That's your problem. You make really bad judgment calls about the safety of technologies you barely understand and instead of listening to people who are trying to point out that you are looking at the wrong things with respect to risk analysis, you just keep repeating the same mistake.

You do not know the true probability of something like that. You only know the impact if it goes tits up. That's the shit you need to mitigate.

There are ways to mitigate the impact of a nuclear reactor meltdown. There's fuck all you can do about trillions of gallons of water creating a desert tsunami that blows out every damn from the Nevada to San Diego, killing many thousands of peoples and wiping out a billion dollars in produce.

Storing that much energy kinetically is a really, really bad fucking idea.

[brewster]

It's also fucking dumb because it puts all your eggs in one basket in terms of risk. It's not amazing; it's fucking stupid to carry that much risk.

The track record proves you wrong, the dam is like 85 years old! You literally sound like someone afraid to fly "because of the risk".

Taleb is brilliant, except when he's dead wrong. His whole thing is build on it. There's no guarantee he'll ever be right. A lot of smart people think he's an idiot.

You are not listening to what I am telling you.

The track record before every disaster looks great. What was the track record before Fukushima?

You don't understand risk. That's your problem. You make really bad judgment calls about the safety of technologies you barely understand and instead of listening to people who are trying to point out that you are looking at the wrong things with respect to risk analysis, you just keep repeating the same mistake.

You do not know the true probability of something like that. You only know the impact if it goes tits up. That's the shit you need to mitigate.

There are ways to mitigate the impact of a nuclear reactor meltdown. There's fuck all you can do about trillions of gallons of water creating a desert tsunami that blows out every damn from the Nevada to San Diego, killing many thousands of peoples and wiping out a billion dollars in produce.

Storing that much energy kinetically is a really, really bad fucking idea.

Yes, it sounds like you do really know better than them, why don't you write FERC a letter explaining why all the big dams needs to come down?

[Speaker to Animals]

The track record proves you wrong, the dam is like 85 years old! You literally sound like someone afraid to fly "because of the risk".

Taleb is brilliant, except when he's dead wrong. His whole thing is build on it. There's no guarantee he'll ever be right. A lot of smart people think he's an idiot.

You are not listening to what I am telling you.

The track record before every disaster looks great. What was the track record before Fukushima?

You don't understand risk. That's your problem. You make really bad judgment calls about the safety of technologies you barely understand and instead of listening to people who are trying to point out that you are looking at the wrong things with respect to risk analysis, you just keep repeating the same mistake.

You do not know the true probability of something like that. You only know the impact if it goes tits up. That's the shit you need to mitigate.

There are ways to mitigate the impact of a nuclear reactor meltdown. There's fuck all you can do about trillions of gallons of water creating a desert tsunami that blows out every damn from the Nevada to San Diego, killing many thousands of peoples and wiping out a billion dollars in produce.

Storing that much energy kinetically is a really, really bad fucking idea.

Yes, it sounds like you do really know better than them, why don't you write FERC a letter explaining why all the big dams needs to come down?

Jesus Christ. NOBODY knows the risk. We only know the impact. We should not be building complicated engineering projects where the risk of failure is totally catastrophic and there is fuck all we can do to mitigate the impact once failure has been reached. That's what storing enormous amounts of energy kinetically means. There's no mitigating it once you lose equilibrium. At least with a nuclear reactor meltdown, it's bad, but there exist strategies to mitigate the impact.

Anybody who sits there and pompously dismisses concerns of obviously high-impact technologies based on their "probabilities and past performance" can fuck right off. Those are the people who create deadly catastrophes.

It's stupid, obviously fallacious reasoning too. You know you have no idea what the actual probabilities are. You can't make up numbers out of your ass and declare something safe because we never saw shit go tits up before like that. We never saw an earthquake trigger a giant fucking tsunami that hit a nuclear reactor just right to blow it's reactor either. What was the probability of that shit, genius??

[Speaker to Animals]

That's the shit you need to consider too.


Fukushima, nobody saw that fucking coming. What are the odds that an earthquake out at sea would happen at just the right place to create the perfect tsunami that would hit this power plant at just the right direction and with just the right force to blow it's reactor?

Yet there were mitigating strategies. This shit went bad really fast. Then engineers gave up their lives to mitigate it.

There are no such strategies with kinetic energy systems. If Hoover Dam ever gets breached, there is NOTHING anybody can do to mitigate what will come from that. It would be biblical in its impact.

The reasoning justifying these kinds of technologies is flawed. We never know whether something is actually going to happen or not. We only know the impact of failure. If we can't even mitigate the impact of that failure, then we shouldn't pursue it when we are talking about something at that scale.

Rank your risks according to impact rather than what you foolishly believe is most likely to occur.

[brewster]

Fukushima, nobody saw that fucking coming.

Not true, engineers saw the flaw in low lying backup generators, but the bean counters said it was too expensive to locate them more safely. They also a dismissed a study saying a 50' wave was possible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/worl ... -says.html

The nuclear accident at Fukushima was a preventable disaster rooted in government-industry collusion and the worst conformist conventions of Japanese culture, a parliamentary inquiry concluded Thursday.

https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/0 ... -pub-47361

In the final analysis, the Fukushima accident does not reveal a previously unknown fatal flaw associated with nuclear power. Rather, it underscores the importance of periodically reevaluating plant safety in light of dynamic external threats and of evolving best practices, as well as the need for an effective regulator to oversee this process.

[brewster]

The whole black swan thing is pretty wrong for the most part. There's rarely something "no one saw coming", but a failure on the part of those empowered who will lose something if they acknowledge the risks. For fucks sake, you're an aircraft tech, and modern aviation is one of the great successes in this, of not ignoring warnings and making sure systems work. Commercial aviation is unbelievably safe, much safer than driving. The recent disaster for Boeing was completely foreseeable, they just didn't want to lose the money they could make doing it wrong by doing it right, and for once the FAA failed to catch it.

But I do see why this doesn't work for you, because it requires a GOVERNMENT AGENCY like the FAA to oversee it, and GOVERNMENT IS BAD!! Most of us recognize we need government regulation to keep food, roads, medication, aviation etc safe. But some people simply don't believe in it. And there's where it ends, huh? Buy your food from the farmer you know, and be careful crossing that bridge over the crick.

[StCapps]

StA is a fucking moron. Hoover Dam even if it blew tomorrow was worth the price, because of all the good provided before it did easily outweighs the damage it will do when it collapses. That doesn't mean you don't build a project with that much upside, what an absolutely preposterous assertion.

Yeah it would have been better to leave the place uninhabitable for over 80 years instead, instead of turning it into farmland and creating a man made oasis in the desert.


SIFCLF's gonna SIFCLF.

[C-Mag]

The civic nationalism myth dies hard with this one.

Just take a drive to minority areas and note the garbage.

Hey, White folks are in Baltimore cleaning up years of filth in Black neighborhoods, and you say Civic Nationalism is dead.

[brewster]

Hey, rich folks are in Baltimore cleaning up years of filth in poor neighborhoods, and you say Civic Nationalism is dead.

fixed that for you.

[C-Mag]

The carrying capacity of the World increased primarily because of fossil fuels, not "technology". Technology made it possible to exploit those resources.

Both are pretty crucial to the increase in food production. In the 70s 'the best available science' predicted a starving planet in the 90s. This was based on the food production numbers and population growth of the 70s. But there was a food production revolution that took place the last 15-20 years of the 20th Century that isn't talked about.

During the 70s dry land wheat farming would produce 35-45 bushels to the acre. By 2000 that same ground would be producing nearly 100 bushels to the acre. Further, in the 70s it would have taken at least 3-5x as many people to do the work.

Likewise Pork and Chicken production has gone from small producers to large corporate factory producers that produce year round. We now have farm raised fish, shrimp and other seafood.

There was a huge revolution in food production, and we are straining the limits of the current technology and methods. It has required the use of a lot of chemicals and genetically modifying plant species. We actually don't know if there will be long term affects. There are certainly hints that things like High Frictose Corn Syrup are not good for the human body, and I'm sure we will learn of more. I guess that's the price we pay to keep food cheap for 8 billion people.